Daring (4 page)

“It’s a tapestry,” she said at last. A millefleurs tapestry of a young noblewoman with a lion resting its head on her lap. A unicorn hid behind a tree, watching the woman and the beast. Behind the unicorn stood a huntsman with his bow and arrow aimed to shoot.

“A friend of mine bought it for me when I won the appointment,” he said in a quiet voice. “It’s called
The Princess and the Lion.
In the next tapestry of the series, the beast is supposed to spring up and protect her from the huntsman. I believe the final tapestry is missing so I don’t know how it all ends.”

Maggie was impressed against her will by the erotic intimacy between the woman and the beast. “I’d have thought the princess would protect the lion,” she said after a moment. “She looks enamored of him.”

“But he would give his life for her.” He turned without warning, lifting the glass from her hand and placing it on the mantel. His smile was captivating, a tiny bit self-conscious, as if he were embarrassed to be talking about something as ridiculous as an imaginary romance. It was hard to believe the power and cold ambition that his charm concealed. “Legend says that the lion w
as attracted to her virginal pu
rity. She looks a little like you, don’t you think?”

She blinked. “Attracted to her
what?
”

“The untamed is drawn to the ethereal.” He grinned boyishly at her shocked expression. “Only a virgin could capture him.”

“A virgin. Fancy that.”

“Sexual attraction is what got him killed.”

Maggie quickly stepped behind a footstool. All this talk of virgins and killing while she was in the act of committing her first crime was making her a nervous wreck. Aside from swearing a lot, which was the worst habit she’d picked up in Heaven’s Court, she considered herself a model of decorum. “This is all very fascinating, my lord, but—”

He nudged aside the footstool with the tip of his shoe.
“
Sexual attraction is a very powerful force.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“Powerful enough to destroy kingdoms and topple empires,” he continued conversationally.

It had also done in a few of Maggie’s ancestresses, those wicked women who’d bucked tradition to follow their hearts. ‘‘Well, it’s been lovely meeting you, but I have to—”

A door slammed somewhere upstairs, followed by a few angry shouts and the sounds of a scuffle. Maggie glanced across the room, holding her breath in apprehension.

“It’s nothing.” Connor brushed his knuckle against her pale cheek. Amusement glinted in the depths of his hazel eyes, amusement and unapologetic male aggression. He wanted this woman. “My sisters have never met a door they didn’t slam. Do you still want to go for a walk?”

She suppressed a shudder. It wasn’t his sisters making that commotion upstairs. She could have told him that if she’d been capable of thinking clearly. But he was seducing her with his smile, with the touch of his strong fingers on her cheek, her chin, her throat. She felt the power of that touch all the way down to her toes. The bare toes that would be the death of her when he transported her to Tasmania for housebreaking.

“Walk with me in the rain,” he said quietly. “We’ll sneak—”

“Connor!
Connor!”

The deafening bellow from the hallway interrupted them. He drew his hand away from Maggie in annoyance a split second before his sister Norah threw open the door. She was tall, attractive, fair-haired, and extremely upset.

“Connor, dallying in the dark with a woman, for God’s sake. Well, am I surprised? Come, quickly. There’s a criminal in the house. Ardath and the chambermaid have got him trapped in your study.”

Maggie turned a ghastly shade of gray. Connor, misinterpreting her reaction as fear, squared his shoulders, the public prosecutor about to spring into unofficial action, the lion ready to protect.

“Don’t go away,” he said in an undertone. “It’s probably just a drunken guest who wandered into the wrong room. But wait here anyway. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

Maggie could only nod in agreement. She was practically shaking with relief. In fact, she had to restrain herself from pushing him out into the hall. She couldn’t very well create a diversion for Hugh hiding inside this room.

Then suddenly Connor stopped at the door and pivoted to stare at her. Norah was shouting out orders behind him. “I know who you are,” he said with a grin of satisfaction. “I know your name.”

Maggie closed her eyes. It was all over now. “Please, God,” she whispered, “don’t let him send me to Tasmania.”

“It’s Philomena.”

She opened her eyes in bewilderment. “What?”

“Philomena Elliot. Your father is always talking about you.” His grin faded, replaced by a look of regret as Norah dragged him out into the hall. “I knew I’d remember—don’t go away.”

C
h
apter

4

“
Y
ou ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Norah forged ahead of him like a drill sergeant, arms swinging, voice strident. “We’ve been looking for you for ages. Everyone was asking where you were.”

Connor scowled and slowed his stride to straighten his white cambric cravat. “I’m sorry you found me. You have the worst sense of timing in the world.”

“That young woman’s parents wouldn’t have thought so,” she said dryly.

Her parents. Connor’s eyes narrowed as he spotted Aaron Elliot in the crowd of guests milling around the bottom of the stairs. Aaron was a mediocre civil lawyer at best. Connor had always secretly thought he was a silly clod, but he was damn well going to pay more attention to him in future.

“I wanted to call the police right away,” Norah said in a miffed voice. “But Ardath, your former
mistress,
insisted I be discreet and find you first.”

“Bellowing like a buffalo is hardly discreet. Anyway, Ardath was right. We don’t want to embarrass an inebriated guest. She could well be holding the Lord President prisoner. The old coot is as blind as a bat. He was probably looking for the privy.”

He strode to the foot of the stairs, pretending to acknowledge the concerned remarks that followed him.

“Be careful going up there, your honor.”

“Best to let the police handle these things.”

“Can you believe the arrogance—breaking into the Lord Advocate’s house?”

“It’ll be Tasmania for the dirty devil! Shouldn’t you take a gun with you, sir?”

No one would dare break into his house during a party. Connor was sure of it. The whole thing would turn out to be an embarrassing mistake. He put his arm around Elliot’s shoulders, drawing the shorter man up the stairs with him. “Good to see you, Aaron. I’m so glad you could come.”

“You are, my lord?” Elliot said, clearly surprised to have been singled out by his eminent host.

“Yes, and I’ve just met Philomena. What a lovely young woman. I don’t blame you for hiding her away in France all these years.”

“Philomena?” Elliot struggled to keep pace with Connor on the winding stone staircase. “A lovely young woman?”

“A shy little violet, isn’t she? I suppose she learned the art of deportment in school.”

“Shy?” Elliot echoed, his footsteps slowing. “Deportment
—my
Philomena?”

“Yes, she’s intelligent and amusing too. Has she always been a recluse, or is this a recent affliction?”

At that Elliot came to a dead halt on the stairs and stared at Connor with blank confusion on his round, perspiring face. “Philomena, a recluse, my lord?”

Connor frowned at him over his shoulder. “What is the matter with you, Elliot? You sound like a blasted parrot.” Before Elliot could frame a reply, Ardath began shouting from his study. “Are you coming to help us or not, Connor?”

“Yes, yes. I’m coming.”

With a last look at Elliot—Good God, it strained the imagination to think such a dull nondescript man had sired that beautiful child—Connor continued up the stairs. He rese
n
ted this intruder, whoever he was. He resented his own party because it took him away from
her.

He paused outside his bedroom door. He could hear Ardath and the chambermaid shouting for him, but they seemed to have the situation under control.

Hell, what if he’d frightened the girl off? Had he overwhelmed her with his obvious interest? He couldn’t remember acting like that with a woman he’d just met. As a matter of fact, he usually didn’t give seducing a woman that much thought. He followed his instincts, or could it be that he had never cared about making a good impression before?

At any rate, something about her had thrown him off balance. Fortunately, even if he had frightened her away, he knew where to find her. Philomena Elliot. Lord, what a name. She’d probably been warned about his reputation. Sheltered in a private school, she had no experience to use as a defense. He’d have to temper his aggressive tendencies the next time he saw her.

He stared at the bedroom door.

Was he losing his mind? He didn’t want to go to his own party. He wanted to walk in the rain with a woman who made him smile. He wanted to talk about French tapestries and drink champagne in front of a fire. What good was his success if he had no one of his own to share it with? When she learned to trust him a little, he would put her at ease, loosen her inhibitions, then kiss her soft rosebud mouth, the white arch of her neck, those graceful shoulders. He would discover exactly what she looked like under that awful cloak.

And then—

Ardath flung the door open in his face. Her red hair was disheveled; her glasses dangled from the tip of her nose.

“What on earth are you doing, Connor?” she demanded.

I’m fantasizing about a woman who looks like the princess in the tapestry you gave me for my birthday. I think you’d approve of her, Ardath.

He frowned, rubbing his bruised cheekbone. “I was coming to help you. Is all this drama necessary? I hope to God you don’t have Hubert locked in my closet.”

“It’s a boy,” she said in a strained voice, drawing him inside the room; she and the chambermaid had barricaded
his study door with every available piece of furniture, the dressing table, a desk, the wing chairs—

“The bed,” he said in astonishment. “You moved the bed.”

“He looked like a very rough sort, Connor,” she said, straightening her spectacles. “I’d come upstairs to fetch the necklace I’d forgotten when I surprised him.”

Connor glanced at the half open balcony doors, wind blowing the brocade curtains inward. The chambermaid was sitting in the middle of the floor, looking terrified and exhausted.

“He was looking for jewelry?”

“No,” Ardath said. “That’s the most disturbing part. I caught him rifling through your papers.”

“My papers?” Connor’s face hardened. “Then he was probably looking for cash.”

She lowered her voice. “He’d gotten hold of your portfolio—the one on the Balfour murder case. There were so many papers stuffed up his shirtsleeves and trousers that he looks like a scarecrow. He knew what he was looking for, Connor. And it wasn’t money.”

Chapter

5

M
aggie didn’t waste any time making her own exit after Connor rushed off to investigate the commotion. As she ran through the house, she felt as though she were a princess in a story awakening from a dark spell, escaping an even darker prince.

Connor Buchanan was not only a lovely-looking lion of a man, he was also perceptive and possessed of a personal magnetism that even she had found difficult to resist. Not that she had much experience in such matters. Most men were too afraid to flirt with her. The Chief intimidated the few suitors brave enough to show any serious interest in courtship. Overprotective, suspicious by nature, he behaved the same way with his young daughter, Janet. Maggie never ceased to marvel that a man who made his living in vice could be so morally minded.

An unconscious sigh of pleasure escaped her as she remembered the unique sensation of Connor’s fingers stroking her throat. Of course, if she ever saw Lord Buchanan again, he’d be putting those strong hands around her neck to strangle her. He wasn’t likely to forgive her for making a fool of him. A shiver of terror jolted through her at the thought of
their meeting again, as prisoner and prosecutor, in a court of law.

Suddenly she stopped, realizing she had no idea where she was. She’d always had a hopeless sense of direction; the Chief tucked a compass in her basket every time she went to market. Somehow, avoiding the party guests, she seemed to have ended up in a priv
ate courtyard off the main with
drawing room.

The outer doors had been left open to the terrace, but the room appeared oddly deserted. Perhaps everyone had gone off to search the premises for more dangerous intruders, such as the one his lordship had trapped upstairs.

The rain had stopped, and Maggie wondered wryly whether this would be a great disappointment to Ardath. And what exactly was the woman’s relationship to Lord Buchanan?

She knew she needed to create a disturbance so that Hugh could escape, but short of setting a fire in the basement, she couldn’t imagine what to do. There wasn’t time to run back to Heaven's Court to ask the Chief for advice. If she hadn’t encountered Lord Buchanan, she would have had a chance to think.

She whirled, startled out of her thoughts, as a wand-slim woman appeared on the terrace steps beside her.

The woman gave Maggie a long assessing look. Maggie looked right back at her, summoning the de Saint-Evremond hauteur to conceal the humiliating fact that she was a housebreaker with twelve pilfered chocolate
éclairs
and two bottles of champagne under her cloak. Her heart pounded against her breastbone.

There was something a little familiar, a little unsettling about the woman—oh, blast, she looked like a paler version of Connor Buchanan. She must be another one of his sisters, judging by that tall thin frame and Nordic elegance.

The woman didn’t seem to have Connor’s self-confidence, though. In fact, she struck Maggie as rather sad and anxious, a woman with worries enough of her own. The impression deepened as she asked, “Who are you?” in a high-pitched voice that sounded as if she were on the verge of tears.

Damn. “I’m—I’m Elliot’s daughter.”

“Philomena?”

“Yes. Philomena.”

A puzzled frown farrowed the woman’s brow, but then it was gone, her own troubled thoughts clearly taking precedence.

A maid came out of the house to bring the woman a shawl. Maggie stared up thoughtfully at the house. She could throw a stone at his lordship’s window and break it, but that wouldn’t be enough of a distraction for Hugh to
make it downstairs. She could—

She pivoted in alarm. A large black
carriage careened around the corn
er and barreled into the courtyard. The driver narrowly missed colliding with the gate. Panic gripped her, paralyzing her reflexes. What if Lord Buchanan had already sent for the police to take Hugh away?

The woman glanced at Maggie, her voice shrill and unnatural above the clatter of wheels. “Look at the way that coachman is driving. Doesn’t he realize he could hurt someone?”

A chill of apprehension darted down Maggie’s spine. There had been a large black carriage in her own past. A carriage commissioned by Napoleon’s police, who had arrived in the middle of the night to arrest her aristocratic parents for treason.

Papa had died of a heart attack on the front lawn of the chateau, struggling to stop the police from dragging Maman away in her nightclothes. But they had taken her anyway, and they had taken Papa's body with her in that carriage. Maggie had been left on the steps, in shock, with her older brother, Robert. Her sister, Jeanette, had remained in the house with Papa’s secretary; Maggie had run inside to warn them.

The rest of that night remained a mysterious blank in her memory, a void of darkness with shadowed figures and voices too distant to make out.

The de Saint-Evremond butler, Claude Vilhers, had whisked Maggie off before morning to his brother’s cottage in LeHavre. She never found out what had happened to her brother and sister. They had completely vanished from her life. From France, Claude and Maggie had escaped across the Channel, smuggled between brandy barrels, to Scotland. Maggie’s elderly Aunt Flora had given them a home until
her death five years ago. She had changed Maggie’s name and kept their whereabouts a secret for fear their political enemies would find her. To this day Maggie had never discovered why anyone would bother to hunt her down. She knew nothing of spying. In
fact, this past year she had de
cided she would no longer try to hide her identity.

She forced herself to take a breath. From habit she suppressed the sorrow and rage that welled up—a black wave of overwhelming emotion. For the most part she refused to let resentment over life’s injustices ruin the present. She was alive. She had her friends, and faithful Claude, who was getting on in years. She had found love and loyalty in unlikely places.

But then at the most unexpected moments the smallest thing would trigger a memory. A woman walking down the street wearing a bonnet like Maman’s. A young boy who looked like Robert hurrying off to school. A girl with Jeanette’s beguiling grin.

Where were her brother and sister now? she wondered. The pain of not knowing their fate had grown unbearable over the years. Did they think of her, remember her? Were they even alive? Not an evening passed that she didn’t remember them in her prayers. Several times she had tried, unsuccessfully, to trace them, but it was as if they had ceased to exist after that night. Had they tried to find her?

The family estates had been confiscated. The chateau was apparently unoccupied and had fallen into disrepair.

And now she was a thief who lived with thieves and gave deportment lessons for a living.

The carriage horses came to a heaving stop in the courtyard. The clamor broke her trance. The carriage door clattered open, and a man in a black velvet domino jumped out. The maid standing behind Connor’s sister gave a fearful shriek, pulling at her mistress’s arm. Maggie’s heart began to race; an eerie sense of
déjà
vu immobilized her. This wasn’t a costume party.

Something was horribly wrong.

The coachman wore a mask too.

For a moment the other man stared in silent assessment at the three women standing as still as statues on the terrace
steps. The next thing Maggie knew he had lunged forward to grab Connor’s sister and drag her across the courtyard.

Their movements looked staged and jerky, like a marionette show, the timing off.

Then the woman started to scream, and so did the maid, their voices echoing in the still aftermath of the storm.

Maggie’s own breath felt trapped in her throat against a cry for help. The woman’s shawl had fallen in a puddle of rainwater. The man in the domino seemed to be having trouble hoisting her into the carriage. Apparently, she was heavier than she looked.

Maggie thought of Maman, crying in fear and shame as they carried her off, shivering in her thin nightclothes. She thought of Papa staggering between the policemen, his hand pressed to his heart. No one helped him. No one lifted a blessed finger to save his life.

The maid had uttered one final, useless shriek before fainting behind the fish pond. The carriage door closed. The curtains were swiftly drawn to obscure the interior. The driver snapped his whip to circle the four horses back toward the street.

Kidnap.

Abduction.

There was a murderer running loose in the city.

My enemies are dying for the chance to destroy me.

But Connor Buchanan was
her
enemy.

If she got involved in his sister’s kidnapping, she’d have to explain her presence at his party. He would probably work twice as hard to get a death sentence for Jamie, and then he would turn his considerable talents on prosecuting her and Hugh. Her life would be over.

I
have to help. This time I won’t let them hurt her.

She didn’t blow where the strange thought had sprung from, or even what it meant. She only knew she couldn’t let this happen.

She started to r
un
after the carriage without any idea what she could do to stop it. But she had to try, even if she ended up in prison. God help her, even if she got transported to Tasmania and did penal servitude with hardened convicts for the rest of her life. She was so afraid for that woman.

She was so angry at what had happened to her own family that an almost supernatural strength flowed through her.

T
he coachman had slowed to pass back through the porte cochere. He was startled out of his wits when he glanced down and saw a wee curly-haired woman climbing up into the box beside him, her face bright with angelic wrath.

“Here,” he said in alarm. “What do ye think ye’re doing?”

“Stop this carriage.” She reached into her cloak. Then she raised a bottle of champagne, of all things, over his head. “Stop this carriage, and let that woman out, or I’ll bash you from here to Friday.”

“What’s going on?” the other man inside the carriage called out in a muffled voice. “Get us the bloody hell out of here before that devil Buchanan comes.”

“There’s a girl up on the box with a champagne bottle,” the driver shouted. “What do ye want me to do with her?”

The bottle came crashing down on his head, but the damned thing didn’t break, even though the woman had thrown her entire weight into it. He swore, and when she came at him again, he put up his hands to protect himself, jerking back on the reins in the process. The horses obediently to
ok off at a sharp trot. The bottl
e slid down between his feet.

He winced as the woman went flying backward off the box. He didn’t wait to watch her hit the ground. This was a bad business, this abduction. He’d said it from the start. He hadn’t wanted any part of it, and now he had a bruised skull into the bargain. There was a woman lying on the ground like a fallen angel, and it was his fault. The maid who’d fainted by the fish pond had started screaming bloody murder again, and people were pouring out of the house to investigate with that cruel bastard Connor Buchanan shouldering to the front of the crowd.

M
aggie stared at the receding carriage in shock. She felt bruised and disoriented from the fall. Her left shoulder ached too much to even lift. Dear God. Her chest was burning too. She wondered if she’d been shot, remembering the strange
pop
she’d heard when she landed. The driver could
have pulled a pistol and shot her because she’d hit him on the head with the bottle. She felt physically sick at the thought of that girl inside the carriage, alone with her captors. Had they hurt her, too?

She felt the ground vibrating beneath her. From the corner of her eye she saw a large gray stallion thundering across the courtyard into the street. She recognized the rider as Lord Buchanan right away, his broad shoulders rigid, his face a study in ruthless determination. He didn’t notice her, and she was relieved. She hoped fiercely that he would hunt down and punish the men who had taken his sister.

Her thoughts drifted into blankness, curiously detached and unafraid. It crossed her mind that she might be dying. Listen to that maid screaming. What an undignified noise to usher you into the afterlife. Shadows were closing in on her. She didn’t try to fight the loss of consciousness.

T
he sounds impinged on the shadows: a muddle of voices, footsteps, the maid babbling between screams that her mistress had been abducted and that the brave woman lying dead by the gate had tried to rescue her. Maggie had no idea how much time had elapsed since she had seen Lord Buchanan cantering past her.

Suddenly there was a crowd of people in evening clothes standing over her, lamenting her demise, Sheena’s abduction, the wicked state of the world that two innocent women should come to such an end.

“I’m not dead yet,” she said weakly, but the party guests were so engrossed in putting together the pieces of the heinous crime that Maggie’s voice went unheeded.

“The murderer has struck again,” one man said with a sort of grim satisfaction.

“It might not be the murderer,” another retorted. “This could have been one of Connor’s rivals taking revenge, or warning him off. He’s Lord Advocate now and can expect this sort of thing.”