For Love of the Earl (8 page)

"But I had nightmares for weeks after that, only in the nightmares, Nathan didn't wake up.
 
I was afraid to sleep at night.
 
I would lie awake and stare at Nathan's bed just to make sure he was breathing.
 
Sometimes I would get so scared, I would go down the hall to Father and Jane's room.
 
I never knocked though.
 
I didn't want my father to think I was scared of something like nightmares.
 
So I just sat on the floor and...listened...and stared at the shapes the moon made on the scary portraits that lined the hallway. "
 

Here at least he stopped his story long enough to roll his eyes in mock horror of the portraits at the Lofton estate.
 
But the gesture had no effect on Sarah.
 
No smile came to her face as he had expected it would not.
 
Sarah just watched him, still beneath his hands.
 
His thumbs moved against the softness of her shoulders in a sort of calming motion, and he wondered when they had started doing that.

"Father and Jane used to talk.
 
All night sometimes.
 
They had only been married then for about three years, and Jane...well, you know about Jane's first marriage, do you not?
 
To the Earl of Doring?"
 

Sarah nodded once, but he felt her tremble beneath his hands.
 
The Earl of Doring had abused Jane until he had suddenly dropped dead beneath a lady employed at Madame Hort's House of Leisure.
 

"Jane wouldn't talk to Father about her marriage to Doring at first.
 
She wanted to keep all of those terrible things from my father.
 
She didn't want that kind of thing to taint her new happiness.
 
But in the end, she couldn't do it.
 
She couldn't keep all of those things welled up inside her.
 
She needed someone to witness it.
 
She needed someone to know.
 
So she started to tell my father.
 
He knew about most of it anyway, but Jane needed to say it out loud, to have someone listen while she told her story.
 
And I would lie by their door and fall asleep listening to their whispered voices as Jane told my father everything."

Alec stopped because he didn't know how much to say to make her understand.
 
He had never had such a conversation in his life.
 
She looked at him and not at his chin or his feet, so he thought maybe he'd said enough.
 
And then Sarah opened her mouth, and he felt relief start to spread through him.
 

But then the door opened, and Alec was spinning around, covering Sarah with his body.
 

Teyssier stood in the doorway, his unusually blond hair as perfect as before, contrasting starkly with the dark stubble of his jaw.
 

"It seems," he said, "That the weather has worsened considerably.
 
I fear we must remain in port until it clears."
 
He adjusted his wrinkled jacket.
 
"I am certain you understand."
 

He bent his head and withdrew.
 

"Alec?" Sarah whispered, sounding hideously small behind him.
 

"I know," Alec nodded, not turning to look at her or moving away so she could move again.
 

"Do you think...Thatcher..." Sarah's voice faded away as her reluctance to form the question burned in Alec's ears.
 

Alec did turn now and pulled Sarah roughly against him.
 
Her arms came quickly and tightly around him, shocking the breath from him.
 
He held onto her, rocked her in a basic gesture of comfort, comfort for him or her, he didn't know.
 

"Thatcher will make it, Sarah.
 
I promise you."
 

~

Dover, England

More than a few hours earlier

"We are going to get bitten from that," Sarah said, wrinkling her nose and taking a step back.
 

Alec agreed with her, but he still felt slightly out of sorts from the shock his system had taken from the freezing ride through the English countryside.
 
So he collapsed on the bedbug-ridden mattress in the room they'd been led to at the inn and closed his eyes.
 
He could feel his body turn on its internal repair mechanism, and it was almost as if a charge of energy began to seep through him as his body began to regain its strength.
 

He felt the mattress dip as Sarah sat down beside him.
 
He wanted to open his eyes to make sure she was where he thought she was, but he didn't have either the energy or the guts to look.
 

She sat right next to him.
 

Not on the other side of the bed.
 
But on the side he had collapsed on.
 
She perched on the edge with her back rubbing against his hip.
 
He groaned and turned his head into the extremely smelly pillow.
 

"Alec, what's wrong?
 
Are you getting worse?"
 

Sarah moved, and he thought she stood, leaning over him.
 
He could smell her and not in a romantic, smells-like-lilacs sort of way.
 
They had been traveling for roughly eight days without any sort of bath, and neither of them smelled like a bouquet of roses.
 

But the thought of Sarah leaning over him in concern seemed ridiculous to him.
 
No matter what had happened the last time they had stopped for the day.
 
His body stiffened as memory burned brighter.
 
He groaned again and rolled over burying his face in the pillow, hoping bedbugs would go right for his eyeballs so that pain would block out the excruciatingly dim yet amazingly clear memory of what had occurred during that last stop.
 

Then Sarah grabbed his shoulder and shook with such force that he thought his eyeballs would fall out before the bedbugs could get to them.
 

"Alec!
 
What is it?
 
Please!
 
Do not frighten me so, my lord!"
 

She shook him again, and the bed threatened to collapse at her onslaught.
 

"I'm fine," Alec murmured into the pillow.
 

He did not need his wife bouncing on the bed with him just then.
 
He really did not.
 

Then Sarah slugged him and got off the bed.
 
Alec felt much better.
 

"Where are we, do you think?"
 

Sarah's voice was further away now.
 
She had probably moved to one of the two windows he had seen before he had collapsed.
 
The sun was just starting to rise, and a thin crack of orange spread through the drab curtains and illuminated their various holes and tears.
 

"Dover," he mumbled.
 

"Really?"
 

He heard the rustling of her skirts as she turned toward him.
 

"Yes."
 

"What are we going to do?"

Alec rolled over and opened his eyes but didn't even contemplate sitting up.
 

"Unless you have the strength to take on the two men standing outside our door, the ones with the pistols in their belts, then I think we do nothing," he said, looking up at the cobwebs spread over the ceiling.
 

"So we're just going to let them take us without a fight?"
 

"We already fought.
 
Well, at least I fought.
 
Feel free to engage in your own fight though.
 
I won't stop you."
 

"Must you be so immature at a time like this?"
 

And wasn't that the truth put into words?
 
Sarah thinking him immature when all Alec ever tried to do was to make her smile.
 
Was to make her love him.
 
If she thought he was being immature, she should really enjoy him when he was being downright childish.
 

"We should do something," Sarah whispered, but he wasn't sure she was speaking to him any longer.
 

Sarah moved the curtains then, letting in more of the strengthening daylight.
 
Their captors only moved them during the night, so it had been quite a while since they had seen much of the daylight.
 
Mostly, they had tried to sleep when they weren't being bounced around in a carriage, or for Alec, being raced through a blinding, numbingly cold rainstorm without a jacket or a hat tied to the top of the carriage.
 
That was something he did not want to relive.
 
Hell, he didn't want to live it the first time.
 

But it wasn't the cold or the stinging rain or the jarring every time the carriage had hit a rut that had tormented him.
 
It was all the images that plagued his mind when he thought of Sarah left alone in the carriage with the oaf with the gold teeth.
 
You can call me Sven
, he had said.
 
Alec had called him every name but Sven in those long hours on top of the carriage.
 
Thinking on what that bastard could have been doing to his wife had stabbed deeper than any of the shafts of rain that had pierced him.

Of course, what had happened after they had untied him from the top of the carriage and hauled him into that shack where he and Sarah were to remain for the day had helped cure him of any of the lingering fear of what had happened to Sarah, but then it had made everything in general by far worse than it had previously been.
       

"Is that Matthew Thatcher?"
 

Alec was out of bed and standing at the window faster than he had ever thought he could possibly move mere seconds before.
 
He leaned over Sarah's shoulder, unconsciously wrapping his arm around her waist to draw her to the side so he could see.
 
He didn't notice how she stiffened at his touch.
 

"That is Thatcher."
 

Matthew Thatcher's decidedly American hat was fairly hard to miss in England, but now it was hardly perceived as Dover was a port town and saw all sorts of people.
 
Thatcher could be any bloke off of any ship that had made port at Dover.
 
People sifted past him on their way to the shops that were just opening.
 
Thatcher stood almost directly across the street, his head bent as he lit a slim cigar.
 
The light of the match cast his face in an unearthly glow.
 

"He doesn't smoke," Sarah said.
 

Alec, whose arm was still around his wife, shook his head.
 
"It's a signal."
 

"A signal?"
 

"He's telling us he knows we're here, but he's going for help."
 

"Why is he going for help?
 
There are only two of them out there!" Sarah whispered so harshly it was almost loud.

"I don't know," Alec whispered, feeling unease settle on his bones like a jacket that was tailored too snugly on one side.
 

Thatcher looked up, his cigar clenched between his teeth.
 
Alec met his eyes briefly, but Thatcher was already turning away.
   

Sarah spun around so quickly Alec almost fell off of his feet.
 

"What are you thinking, Stryden?"
 

Sarah's eyes were squinted to an unnaturally sinister degree, and Alec backed away.
 

"I think this is much bigger than two men outside our door."
 

He stepped further away.
 

"I think we've been brought here to be exchanged.
 
Traded."
 

"What?" Sarah's mouth moved into a serious sneer of doubt.
 
It was a look with which Alec was well acquainted.

"Thatcher could have taken those two men," Alec pointed at the door as if Sarah could see who was standing beyond it.
 
"But he didn't.
 
I think there's something much bigger and much worse than we had originally thought."
 

"Like what and why?
 
Why are you so important?"
 

Alec frowned at her.
 
"I know you do not think very highly of me, but in some circles, I'm quite the thing."
 

He sat down on the bed with greater force than he had intended, and the bed sagged precariously.
 
Both he and Sarah stopped to watch and see if it would completely break.
 
It didn't, so Sarah picked up the conversation.
 

"What I think of you is not important.
 
Why do others think you're so important?"
 

"I'm a titled spy.
 
Meaning I'm a nobleman in a dangerous, potentially treasonous position."
 

"Treason?
 
How do you figure treason into this?"
 

"I could be bought."
 

"No, you couldn't," Sarah said, which had Alec looking up at her sharply.
 
But then her face paled, and Alec knew she hadn't meant to blurt that out.
 

"You're right.
 
I can't be bought, no matter the price.
 
But they don't know that.
 
So, I'm valuable in the right hands."