Regency Rogues Omnibus (68 page)

Brynmore straightened his tall frame away from the wall. “Aye.”

“I’ve held two of my shipping vessels just on the odd chance we would need them quickly. They are set to sail upon your needs,” Radford said.

“Your intuitions are honed as usual, Radford,” Drummond said, then he shifted in his chair and stood. “We will use beacon-lighted messages across the channel. Brynmore, you can see Radford to set up a workable schedule. The rest of you, gentlemen, settle your affairs. We will meet here every evening to further our plans. However, it should take Brynmore a fortnight to lay the ground work and find the scent, as it were.”

“If any good can come from this,” Saxon said. Then he paused, looking at each one of them before continuing, “I am glad The Order of the Satyr selected me, because gentlemen, with your help we could be the only group with the resources and ability to destroy this evil. Those bastards made a huge mistake!”

Chapter Two

Kit stood at the weathered railing of the ship. The day was clean and sunny with the sea as calm as she’d seen it on the crossing from America. They were one day away from laying an anchor on the French coast, and then another day’s carriages ride into Paris. Her destination. Where she would finally begin to find out what had happened to her brother. Where had Clay gone?

Clayton, he preferred to be called now, she reminded herself. In his last letter six months before, he’d written to her about how the name change suited him better and suited the social climate in Paris. He went by Clayton and had angrily purged their family’s last name of Montoya, as a direct and intended insult to their father.

“You have to be more sociable. That plump gal with those pretty daughters is a Countess!”

Kit started from her thoughts to look sideways at her husband Nick standing beside her. His approach had been undetected until he’d spoken. Immediately, her gut cringed inward upon hearing his disparaging voice or feeling him anywhere near her. Lord, she hated him.

“I told, the Countess, we had been married much longer than the three month newlyweds we really are. How could I do anything less with you dressed as you are and acting as you do? I swear, Filly, the countess thought you were a man.” Nick sneered sideways at her, in his pretense of superior bearing. It was a difficult thing to accomplish for a former river-rat gambler that she’d finally discovered he’d been. “What the hell was wrong with the dress I borrowed for you? Can’t you do one thing right?”

Kit’s gloved fingers curled tightly over the splintered wood of the railing. One of the wood’s slivers poked through the leather of her glove along her inner palm. She did not care. She hoped it had drawn blood, so she squeezed harder. Nick Ralston was the biggest mistake she’d made in her life. What continued to amaze her was how she could allow his insults and verbal jabs to affect her anymore. As much as she tried to pretend to him, to everyone else, even to herself that they did not hurt, they still did. That in itself humiliated her. That she should even care!

It did not matter that she was still reeling from the consummate con Nick Ralston had perpetrated on her. He’d changed overnight from a charming suitor comforting her over her father’s death to a man who was overbearing and critical of her every opinion at every turn. He was simply a snotty and snobbish gold digger.

And, I am dressed fine,
Kit thought. Little did Nick know that she’d half planned to leave him behind when the ship docked and take off riding into Paris on her own. So, she was wearing legging skirts to ride astride. What did she care what some Countess with her pretty daughters thought? Darling daughters that Nick paid too much attention to for a married man. Kit was not going to Paris to become a socialite, but to find her brother.

“You should not have come along,” Kit stated tightly.

“If you had more sense, neither of us would be here. What type of idiot goes searching for a brother that can steal our entire rightful inheritance?”

“That is all you care about! That is all you’ve
ever
cared about,” Kit accused hotly turning away from Nick.

She started to rush away but Nick caught her upper arm, painfully stopping her. “I expect you to act properly. As my wife.”

“Properly! How?” Kit asked, staring at his hand digging into her arm. “As the wife of nothing more than a river boat gambler?”

Nick squeezed his fingers so hard tears sprang to her eyes. “I will teach you!”

Kit’s anger flowed over, and she spat, “I swear to God, Nick Ralston, I will give away every penny, every parcel of land in my father’s estate, that you covet so greatly, if you try to get in my way now!”

Nick drew in a hissing breath and through clenched jaw and gritted teeth, he said, “That faggot brother of yours will never get
my
money or my land!”

Kit jerked her upper arm free with more strength than she realized she possessed, and she stalked to the entryway to go below. She did not stop her head long rush until she reached her cabin where she threw open the door, rushed inside, then she slammed it closed, bolting it behind her.

She ended with her spine pressed to the closed door and her lungs gasping for air. Where had she gotten the courage to speak to Nick that way? He frightened her, and he would make her pay, no matter how long it took. He was capable of patiently waiting to spring on her. She had to get away from Nick, before he was able to find a chance to take her to bed and land her pregnant. That was what he waited for and stalked her for, a way to force himself upon her. However, she’d slept with the door bolted and a knife clutched in her hand ever since Nick changed so drastically.

It happened when she said she was going to find her brother, and Nick thought that ownership of the Montoya Empire could be in jeopardy. Before that, he’d been an enjoyable lover and a charming husband, even though she still had not felt toward him as she thought she should, and at the time she had berated herself silently. Those had been quiet and terse arguments in her head about how Nick was a decent man, and she should be grateful. However, it had all been an act on Nick’s part, put on for her father before he’d died, then later continuing to play act upon her. There were times in the past when her gut told her that things were off or strange about Nick. Yet, she’d brushed them aside, ignoring them. Instead in her grief, she’d followed her father’s deathbed wishes that she marry.

“But that is over now!” she exclaimed, unclenching her hands, which she braced on her belly as though warding off a blow. Then, she walked to the bureau, which was built into the wall of her cabin with a small cloudy-surfaced mirror attached above it. Salty sea air and time had tarnished the mirror’s surface, but Kit could still generally make out her slender features. She was boyish with short wavy light blond hair and tan skin spotted with light freckles. She’d always worked on the land with her father and brother, before Clay left. Her mother had died giving birth to her, so there had not been a lot of female influences in her life. Nevertheless, she’d gone back east for two years, attending a school for ladies, and she’d learned all the proper manners and clothing styles a lady should present.

More than that though, she was practical, and long hair did not go well with roping and branding cattle, nor did fancy skirts go with riding a horse into Paris to escape Nick. Little did Nick know that she’d a trunk loaded with womanly gear stowed in the hold that she would have delivered to Paris?

Nick was in for a lot of surprises because this long journey aboard the ship had given her time to think about more than just the plans to find her brother. She also realized this was the best time to lose Nick’s presence beside her in the sprawl of Paris. It was time to find a lawyer to annul or divorce her farce of a marriage.

Nick would be furious, and she was afraid of him. Only his words so far, but those venomous words and opinions held the real chance of physical violence behind them. She did not intend to get caught in the eventuality that he would become violent. She would find her brother to bring him home. She would divorce Nick, and then Clay would help keep Nick from causing her further trouble.

Kit hated to bring problems like this to Clay. She really just cared more about finding him and bringing him back home where he belonged. They would deal with the difficult conditions of her father’s will after that. If nothing else, she still had land and a home left to her from her grandmother. She would not let the demands of their father’s will tear her and Clay apart. She cared for Clay more than any Montoya land empire.

Damn her father! He’d been a difficult and hard man, but normally a just one. If only he could have accepted Clay for who Clay was, a man who loved other men. However, her father’s deeply controlling personality had caused him to run roughshod over Clay until Clay finally broke. But her father had never realized Clay’s strengths, and he’d thought Clay would break down and realize that he was wrong. Instead, their father drove Clay away.

Clay broke, and then he ran.

But now, she vowed that she would find Clay, and she would convince him to come home with her. She had his last letters and she knew where he’d been residing, so she willed herself to be certain that there was a simple explanation for his six months of silence. Maybe, their father had written Clay about his illness, or perhaps Clay had found a new love and gone off with him without thinking, in the way new love could be. Kit certainly prayed so, because she was going to do anything it took to find her brother. He was the only family she had left.

Chapter Three

“I won the wager, Drummond, you must not complain,” Gabriella said. “Really, Drummond, you threw our fencing match just so that I would win, and now you have to be my love slave for the evening.”

“That is not correct, madame,” Drummond replied with his charcoal eyes calculating the see-through lavender pinafore Gabriella wore, and the bottle of amber oil she held in one hand, with a straight razor held in the other. “I have taught you fencing well enough for you to beat me now.”

“Do not pout, amour,” Gabriella said smiling with a sultry shadow in her purple irises as she gazed at his muscular frame, still dressed in fashionable riding attire. “But undress slowly, please.”

“I do not pout, madame,” Drummond said. “However, didn’t I shave your luscious pussy just this morning, I believe?” he asked with his gaze lowering to her now denuded sex. Just the touch of his gaze brought heat to Gabriella’s bare pussy lips.

She stifled the urge to squirm. “Yes, of course you did. I remember it well. And, afterward . . .” she paused.

Keenly, Drummond picked up the narrative. “You rode my face like a champion rider in a high stake horse race.”

“Really, Drummond!” Gabriella’s rouged lips formed a moue with a blush heating her cheeks. “You are a very contrary slave.”

Drummond’s broad shoulders shrugged, and then broadened as he lifted his fingers to the ties on his loose dark brown riding shirt. “Never let it be said that I do not honor my wagers, Orchid.” Gabriella smiled again, Drummond had called her Orchid now after their first night of love making, when the next morning she’d woke with his orchids scattered over her body. “I am just not certain, Gabriella, how well I will do not being the master.”

“You did quite well on our wedding night, amour,” she reminded him as she watched the flexing of sinew over his chest, belly, then upper arms as he pulled his shirt upward over his head.

“I was tied to our bed then, for your carnal ministrations,” he muttered, tossing his shirt onto one of the chairs, at the foot of their large four-poster bed.

Gabriella walked to the side of the bed and placed the straight razor next to the bottle of oil on the bedside table. “No ties this time,” she purred, looking at him through the curls of her auburn hair. “Now your pants please, my handsome love slave. And tell me, how did it feel without your small cloth beneath your riding britches during your ride, after your meeting with the Archangels this evening?”

Gabriella watched Drummond’s handsome lips firm as she sat on the side of the bed next to her mink cloak, which she’d spread out on top of the bed covers earlier. Drummond had just been downstairs for his meeting, but she’d requested as the first command of her new love slave that he take a ride through the park after his meeting. She’d also asked intimately that he wear no underpinnings beneath his britches. The ride had given her time, after visiting with Nia, Chloe, and Orelan, and after hearing the disturbing tale that Joelle had revealed to them, to walk home from Nia’s, and then to set the stage for her newly acquired love slave.

Gabriella wondered at the fate of timing, for her and Drummond to be playing this particular love game now. After hearing Joelle’s tale, she realized she would have to use every trick she could envision to convince Drummond that she and the other ladies needed to be involved in whatever retribution the Archangels undertook.

She’d stayed in the shadows of her first marriage, docile, and now she knew that her first husband had pushed her aside to the country, out of his way. She had no intentions of allowing that to happen again. Besides, she and Drummond had lost too much time together in their earlier lives, to ever be parted again. The gentlemen of the Archangels needed their women on this campaign. They just did not realize it yet.