Glittering Promises (34 page)

He laughed, let out a little whoop, and bent down to pick me up at the waist and twirl me around above him. He was grinning, eyes wide, as if he couldn’t quite believe this was happening.

Belatedly, we both seemed to remember Pierre. I looked over to him, even as Will slowly let me slide to the ground, taking care not to hurt my arm. Pierre appeared still stunned that when he actually offered, I could find it in myself not only to turn him down but to turn his invitation into an acceptance for Will. His arrogance made me wince a little, confirming again that I had made the right decision. But I still felt sorry—desperately sorry—for hurting him.

“A word, Cora?” Pierre asked, pain etched into every syllable. His eyes moved to Will’s, asking permission. “Just a turn around the garden,” he said.

I nodded, moving forward, then stopped and looked back at Will, wanting to make sure he was all right with this. He lifted his chin. “No farther than around that bend, please, unless you want company,” he said, gesturing toward Pascal and Antonio.

“There is no need for a guard,” Pierre said stiffly, then awkwardly offered me his arm. I took it, feeling the lout again. Was he wanting a moment to try to convince me? Or to yell at me, releasing his anguish on me?

We climbed the sloping pathway in silence and, behind us, heard quiet congratulations being shared all around. At the turn, we entered a small building, walled on three sides, and a flower-shaped fountain pool beneath a woman’s robust figure. This one did not yet flow, but there was water halfway up its walls, and the walls were wide enough to sit on. Despite the tension, I realized how weary I was and sat down first, concentrating on not fainting again, in order to give Pierre his due, once and for all.
And then be done with it.

“Pierre, I’m sorry,” I said, reaching across to take his hand. He allowed me to hold it, but he did not move. “I never wanted to hurt you. And I never suspected for a moment that you would make a public spectacle of your proposal.”

“Forgive me if I offended,” he said stiffly.

“No, no,” I said with a shake of my head. “This is coming out wrong. I…I thought… I’m sorry,” I finally said, knowing there was little else I could say that would make it right in any measure.

“How? How can you…” He paused, gathered himself and asking levelly, “How can you choose him over me?” His handsome green eyes were shrouded in pain.

“I…I simply know he will be a good husband to me. You and I,” I said, with a squeeze to his limp hand, “have been mismatched from the start.”

“But wasn’t that part of the romance?” he said quietly, his eyes growing far away, as if he was imagining our first meeting aboard the ship.

“For certain,” I said, slowly nodding. “But it was the start of an impossible romance, Pierre. A fantasy. Not a solid, God-given love.”

He stilled at that. “I see,” he said, pulling his hand away from mine and tapping his fingertips together. “You feel what you have with William is God-ordained.”

“Yes,” I said as gently as I could.

“And there is nothing I could do or say to persuade you otherwise?”

I shook my head slowly.

He rose, as if in pain, and offered me his hand. I took it and stood up, waiting for him to say what he needed to. “Then I bid you adieu,
mon ange
,” he said, lifting my hand to his lips, and I saw that his eyes were wet with tears, which made me choke up too.

There was nothing to say but good-bye. No way to lessen the pain, nothing that wouldn’t ring hollow in his ears.

But then a man behind Pierre, dressed in dark clothing, rose from an unseen doorway, taking Pierre in a choke hold, dragging him backward. Through the doorway again and then disappearing altogether.

Stunned, I opened my mouth to scream. But it was impossible. Because a second man materialized behind me. He wrapped one arm around my waist and a hand around my mouth. He lifted me easily. I struggled, writhing back and forth, gasping in pain when the movement rammed my arm against the fountain. I was on my feet, desperately trying to gain purchase on the smooth tiles, trying to wrench away from him. I had to get away for more reasons than one. His hand now covered both my nose and my mouth.

My lungs burned with need, and I could feel my knees give way, ceasing their fruitless attempt at resistance. He was simply too big, too strong for me to fight off, especially when I was so recently injured.

My vision tunneled, quickly narrowing.

Will
, I thought.
Will!

And then, all was black.

~William~

Will paced back and forth, twenty feet from the small alcove where Pierre and Cora had disappeared. It had been ten minutes or more. Had they not had the time to say all they needed to say? Was the man trying to talk her out of her decision? Should he intervene?

He wrung his hands. She was his. She’d agreed to marry him! He couldn’t get over his good fortune, God’s grace, His mercy. After all this time, things were finally going to go his way. He could feel it!

His eyes moved to the end of the path again. Where were they?

He stepped forward, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to be the cad, intervening when they’d only wanted a moment of privacy to say their good-byes. The poor man had just been turned down, humiliated…

But when his eyes met Antonio’s and Felix’s, both clearly as anxious and concerned as he, he turned back to the empty path. He hurried up it then, Felix and Antonio right behind him, rehearsing one sentence after another as explanation for his intrusion and tossing each aside as inadequate. He finally faced the alcove into which they’d entered.

It was empty.

And it was only as Antonio joined him and walked around the far side of the fountain, then discovered the knob-less door, that the shout gathered in his throat.

“Cora!” Will shouted. “
Cora
!”

He moved outside and around, shouting her name again and again as the others rushed to him. He turned to Antonio and said, “Stay with the rest, and get them safely up to the villa.” Then he turned to Pascal and the other detectives and quickly dispersed them. He hoped, with everything in him, that Cora and Pierre had simply taken a path for a short walk, or gone upstairs to the villa because she was feeling poorly. Over and over, he banished thoughts of anything else. Of Pierre being a target for kidnappers himself. Of the two of them bringing twice the bounty—and thus being twice the attraction.

Will ran hard up the slope, past footmen clearing the luncheon table, past gardeners and fountain masters, calling Cora’s name over and over again and even Pierre’s.

But there was no response.

They had vanished.

“No,” he muttered. It wasn’t possible.

“Cora!” he screamed.

~Cora~

I fought back against the darkness, dimly recognizing that I was in danger, that men were carrying me, dumping me painfully into the back of a motorcar, then driving off with me. I blinked and blinked again, willing my vision to steady from a constant swirl that made me want to vomit, trying to decipher words as men shouted back and forth.

Where was Pierre? Was he with me?

Slowly, my vision focused, and I saw that I was bound hand and foot in the back of a motorcar, as I’d gathered. I was sitting tightly between two big men, both in the gardener’s uniforms I’d seen others in earlier. Across from us was a man with a large gun pointed at Pierre, who was also tied up.

We turned a corner too sharply and all moved to one side, the man next to me pressing against my injured arm. I yelped, and my vision ran.

“Oh, sorry,” he said.
American
, I thought, and judging from the accent, East Coast.

“Silenzio!”
said the man with the gun, who was most definitely Italian. He waved his pistol at the American and made a show of clamping his lips shut and locking them. Apparently, they could not communicate beyond that.

“I don’t suppose,” I began, shrinking a little inside as all four men stared in my direction, “that you have anything to drink? I’m dreadfully thirsty.”

The Italian with the pistol stared at me as if bored, then he waved at the American, apparently giving him permission to answer me.

“Nothing in here, sweetheart. Sorry. But it’s not long until we get to where we’re going.” He reached up and pressed against the roof of the car, trying to keep from leaning against my injured arm again as we made another sharp turn. “Hawke!” he cried. “Ease up on those turns! There’s no one behind us!”

I froze at the sound of the name, and the man looked over his shoulder briefly to meet my gaze. “Nice to see you again, Miss Cora,” he crowed. “So pleased that you could drag your Frenchie into the mix one last time so that I could quadruple my earnings on a certain exchange.”

He smiled at the man in the passenger seat, and my eyes shifted to Pierre. He looked terrible, oddly gray-skinned and with a bruise rapidly forming beside his right eye. Beneath it was a small cut, with a short smear of blood, as if he’d brushed at it with his hands. He looked woozy, his head nodding down, then jerking up, then nodding again. “Pierre…” I tried.

His head jerked up, and he looked over at me, grim and in obvious pain.

What scared me most was that he didn’t say anything. No words of comfort, no light joke to try to ease my tension.

Because he was clearly as frightened as I was.

CHAPTER 32

~William~

When they reached the top of the hill, a footman looked over to them as if stunned. “They came so fast,” he said, lifting his hands. “They had them,” he said, gesturing toward William, Antonio, Pascal, and Felix, surely meaning Cora and Pierre. “They dragged them into the motorcar and
vroom
, off they went.”

“Did you recognize any of them?”

“No, but two or more spoke English.”

Will’s heart paused and then pounded painfully. “Did one have blond hair, about this tall?”

The footman, eyes wide, nodded.

Nathan Hawke.

Pain and fury flooded through Will. How had he managed it? To track them here to this private estate and find the rare moment when Cora was unprotected? And not even that, she had been with Pierre…

The others had already begun running toward their motorcar, and Will did the same. He yelled over his shoulder, “How long ago?”

“Three or four minutes!”

“What color was the car?”

“Black!”

Black didn’t help him. Nearly all motorcars were black. And three or four minutes? Was that enough time for them to make it to the main road? Or another road he wouldn’t think to follow?
Cora
, he cried internally, anguished, as he jumped into the car beside Antonio, who pressed on the gas even as they were shutting the last two car doors. The car lurched, almost died, and then chugged up the hill and over it.

They drove pell-mell through town, dodging wagons and pedestrians and even a goat, and when they finally began to descend the mountain—and Will could see the upper half of the serpentine road exposed—he swallowed hard.

Because it was empty.

~Cora~

“Look out!” someone yelled up front.

We were all thrust forward, almost out of our seats, as the brakes were applied and then, abruptly, the gas. We fell back.

Up front, Nathan laughed and looked back at me. “There went your last hope! One lone police car, now off the road!”

We had finished trekking the last of the switchbacks down the small mountain, it seemed, and now Nathan was driving faster and faster. Clearly, he knew the police weren’t my only protection. Did he think they would still be standing in the gardens, gazing at the fountains, wondering how long Pierre and I would tarry? I knew Will wouldn’t have been too patient. I wanted, with everything in me, to look back and see if I could spot his motorcar somewhere on the mountain road, chasing us, but I dared not. If Nathan wanted to believe he’d escaped them, so be it.

I was still hoping Will and the others would somehow appear behind us when the car lurched to a halt and the men roughly dragged us out, separating me and Pierre into two cars, half the men entering one, half entering the other. Pierre and I shared one last fleeting, grim glance. In a matter of seconds, we were off again.

This time, I did look back, watching in chagrin as our original motorcar pulled out behind us, going slowly, as if he wanted to be seen or wanting to create a physical barrier. I straightened and tried to gather enough saliva to swallow, thinking.
A decoy. He’ll lead Will onto the wrong road…

My eyes flicked up to see Nathan gazing back at me, a sly smile on his face. He did not have to say anything for me to understand.

Pierre and I were in deep, deep trouble.

There was one man to my left and one across from me. Two up front, including Nathan. I thought there was likely an equal number in Pierre’s car, but I couldn’t be certain.
Pierre…
I thought in anguish. It was all on account of me that he was in this mess. Why couldn’t I convince him in Venice that we weren’t meant to be? Why had he insisted on coming to Rome at all? And Tivoli? I shook my head. An arrow of guilt shot through me that I was glad I wasn’t alone in this, glad he was in this with me, even if we weren’t in the same car for the moment.
Pure selfishness
, I chided myself. I didn’t want anything to happen to Pierre.

I knew that if Will caught up with us, or if I managed to escape, that was when it’d become most dangerous. Nathan wanted me and Pierre alive so he could extract a double ransom. Why else would he have taken us? It was why he’d tried before. But if I escaped, he’d want me dead. Because this time, he’d certainly be caught or hunted down. I would pay a hundred detectives myself to find him.

Nathan glanced back at me in the mirror and then did a double take. “What is this?” he asked in a patronizing tone. “There is something new in your eyes. I do believe you’re angry with me. But I didn’t believe sweet Cora Diehl would ever look at me as if she wanted to kill me. You’ve changed since Vienna.”