Regency Rogues Omnibus (74 page)

Her plans were that she would search the apartment, buy a brace of pistols immediately after, and then find a man to hire as both a guard, but more importantly, as a fellow investigator into her brother’s disappearance.

Chapter Nine

The hour of the day was in Brynmore’s favor. It was late afternoon and the time many people took to rest before the evening. It left the Paris streets less crowded as he followed one of Miss Montoya’s burly assailants. As much as he itched to take the brute down a deserted alleyway for the justice of his fists, he fought the urge. Over the years, he’d trained himself better than to fall prey to the Scottish barbarian heredity of his ancestors lying deep within his soul. Intelligence over fists! He had learned that with admiration at Drummond’s side.

He had a job to do, and as much as the defenseless and partially naked image of Miss Montoya plagued him, he drove through it to further his quest. His gut told him that he was on the right trail now. Even with only a view of the backs of Miss Montoya’s attackers, he was fairly certain these two were the Germans, Baco and Cernno that Saxon had described. He was lucky that they had not gotten a clear look at him. They were wary of being followed the first quarter mile, but he was better at staying out of sight than they were worried.

The Germans went another mile before they reached their destination, and then things became increasingly interesting. The lavish old baroque townhouse Cernno and Baco approached and entered showed clears signs of decamping. There was one flat board cart full of furnishings pulling away from out front when Brynmore settled behind a box-trimmed hedge across the avenue. The concealing hedge was next to the townhouse beside a narrow alleyway on the opposite side of the avenue.

He watched two male servants lifting a spectacular harp into another half cart, just as a large four-door carriage pulled up behind the cart. Brynmore waited expectantly for someone to open the door and climb down from the carriage. However, this did not happen and the driver just waited patiently up on top. A short time later, a footman and a butler came out carrying a traveling trunk with two apron-clad maids following behind carrying large valises. All were loaded onto the carriage.

Somehow, Brynmore thought, these did not belong to the suspects, Baco and Cernno. The harp and the elegant trunk with the various valises had feminine, or at the very least, a well-appointed nobleman’s look to them. The Germans were more rustic.

Some ten minutes later his theory was confirmed, when an ornately dressed woman, trailing her elaborate skirts, came out of the townhouse with Baco and Cernno. The woman spoke something to one of the two Germans as she approached the carriage. Brynmore cursed his hearing loss as he picked out details of the woman. Older, with an out-of-style powdered wig, sharp nose, and thick theatrical makeup on her face. Dame Baset, perhaps?

Brynmore could feel the crawling itch, slithering up his spine, and the scent of his prey wafted through his senses as he watched the three enter the carriage. He could try to follow, but without a carriage of his own or a horse, it would prove difficult. First, he would try a moment of information gathering while keeping the carriage in sight. To this end, he left his surveillance position and approached the servants still loading the last cart. He had a question about the harp on his tongue, and in little time, he had the owner’s destination. It was an outlying area of Paris and from there to the docks. To further ask the name of the ship that the three were boarding or the ship’s destination would leave too much suspicion of his casual attentions.

Brynmore tipped his hat and quickly headed in the opposite direction. A swift horse would get him there before his quarry. He knew that he was ultimately just going on hunches, however, too many things pointed to this being the right direction. He had to follow it. Going to the little known Aleuts docks could easily confirm his suspicions, and it would also put him near the French coast where he needed to be to send messages by lantern beacon across the channel. The times were set at midnight each night that a courier in Drummond’s employ would wait for Brynmore’s possible updates.

Now, he thought, he had something to share. His main concern was the overseas destination of the three he was following. His second concern was the fact that he might have to leave the French coast immediately to follow them overseas. That meant leaving Miss Montoya without a word. It could also mean leaving her with other players around, players she knew nothing about. He felt certain that she would keep poking and prodding after her brother, stirring up nests of potential danger everywhere she trod.

“Yer bloody daft,” he accused himself.

She was obviously of the genteel lady sort, and the trauma she’d gone through would surely send her backtracking to her home. As much as he tried to deflect the nagging war inside him traveling from one camp of reason to the other concerning Miss Montoya’s motives or further methods, it would not leave him alone.
And why,
he thought that he had any chance to guess what this one woman might do, he had no clue!

Nevertheless, the only way he was able to quiet his internal carping, was to write a hasty note and give it to a messenger at the nearest livery. He gave a livery boy two pence to deliver the note to one of his personal associates that he used when in Paris. This one was a former spy for England, now set up as a leisurely lawyer in Paris. Brynmore made sure his instructions to the livery boy were clear. He was to deliver the message to Mr. Barcliff and tell Mr. Barcliff to find the woman whose name was on the outside of the missive and deliver it to her. This was of the utmost importance.

He decided not to long after, while he galloped his hastily purchased stallion down the Paris streets, that what he had succumbed to with the note and inclination, were both bloody good reasons
never
to involve women in any mission! They distracted a man’s mind, his timing, and his direction. They caused worry, when a man needed full and sharp attention.

“I’m bloody well glad that Drummond and the others are standing firm against their women being involved with this,” Brynmore muttered, as he urged the stallion to further speed, with the wind sharpening and knifing through his clothes.

Chapter Ten

“You are the whore who married a Duke,” Nia muttered to herself, tracing her long pink-painted fingernail absently on the glass top of the table she sat beside. She was, “taking the sun” amongst the flowering gardens behind her ducal residence in London, supposedly, a noble recreation for a Duchess.

It really should not bother her. Everyone ... well, at least Radford’s closest friends, treated her like one of their own. However, some of Radford’s stuffy family had pinched noses about her pedigree, or lack of. But they were that way all the time, Radford would tease her. Radford, the rogue, the man of his own making, besides being bred a Duke. He walked his own way and cared little what noble acquaintances thought.

“My family is well taken care of too,” Nia muttered. Her younger brothers and sisters loved Radford as if he were their uncle. They were there in residence with them more times than not. Radford never bemoaned the care it had taken to continue raising them. Instead, he’d embraced it with efficiency, the right amount of sternness, and large amounts of true affection.

I am,
Nia thought,
living in the perfect bonny fantasy.
Radford was her prince come to save her. She was the somewhat tarnished princess, saved and redeemed by love. “He does love me!” she argued, gazing out at the sun-dappled roses. “I’m just not sure that he likes me.”

She thought she had evidence too. Radford would never say that he loved her, and then just stop loving her. However, he’d never said anything about liking her, and the way they had met and fallen in love was so chaotic. It wasn’t as if they had spent great amounts of time discovering what they had in common.

“Hmm, let’s see, what common interests could a tart and a Duke have?” she exclaimed, slouching back irritably in her chair. Not that she’d been a practicing lady of the night for years. “Blimey, it was only weeks,” Nia paused, “But, I was good at it!”

It seemed that sex was the only thing she and Radford had in common, earth-shattering ground-shaking sex. But it was not enough and that is why Radford was so quiet lately. He actually brooded now, and he had never done that before. Now, he barricaded himself in his study for long hours in the evening, where before they would spend their evenings together. He never came to bed anymore unless he thought she would be asleep.

“In fact, we never make love, but in the deep of the night,” Nia muttered with the realization. They only made love now when Radford woke her early in the morning, then he always left before they really talked. “It is because he has discovered he has nothing to say to you,” she mumbled.

Had the class distinctions finally settled in, she wondered? What else could she expect? She had been a professed tart, and they were good for sex, but not for talking too. She wiped a small tear from her eye, blinking into the sunlight. Blimey! She was not reduced to crying? Was she? Hard-nosed Nia O’Shea from the best Irish stock ... weeping!

“Och!” she exclaimed. This was daft. She did not know how to be a wife with a brooding husband, a husband that did not like her. Nia tossed down the quill pen she’d held in her other hand. She’d been trying to write poetry, hoping the sunlight would improve her mood. She stood in a flurry, casting her papers and pen to the ground. Then she turned and fled into the mansion.

Radford rocked back on his heels, one hand hitched in his pocket, the other clamped to the silver knob of his cane. His blurring one-eyed gaze tried to follow his wife’s hurried leave taking. He had been watching her, hidden behind the large oak, his favorite in a well-planned landscape. At the time, his wife had been sitting still as a lovely vision in the sunlight, and he’d been able to see her more clearly. But her rapid movements just now had blurred his faltering vision, yet he had heard her sobs.

“Damnation,” he cursed. Perhaps, Nia was pregnant and over emotional? Yet, he knew that was a lie. She could be with child, yes. However, that was not the cause of her emotional state. He knew it was him.

How had he let everything go so far? He had trapped them both, because he was so afraid of giving her up. Now everything loomed, and still he’d not found the courage to tell her, and then release her. The evil part of his soul had hoped that she would become pregnant, and it would be added leverage for her to stay with him, when she discovered that he was going blind.

Yet, that was illogical and unreasonable, because he wanted her gone in that case. He intended to demand it! She was young, beautiful, and vivacious. How could he limit her?
Because she is your wife until death do you part!
Radford blinked his one eye up into the sun. But Nia had not had the truth when he’d foolishly and greedily married her. No one had. Somehow, in his arrogance and happiness, he’d thought his eyesight would improve. Now, he was left on the edge of a steep cliff. He had to jump. He had to tell his wife and he had to tell the Archangels. Still, he hesitated with such control in his hands to completely change his life forever.

“You, arrogant imbecile,” he berated himself. The control was out of his hands and had been out of his hands each month by darkening month as his eyesight worsened.

Radford tapped his cane in disgust, then he moved toward Nia’s strewn papers. It was a mission to read while he still could, to love for as long as he could hold on. Radford reached down and picked up Nia’s papers, lifting them up to the sunlight to read slowly.

“Passion would keep one eye blue. Love would linger with sight deep in our souls. Naked together we see our desire. Breasts to chest, loins slick. We need no light. Our sight is but love.” Radford’s fingers curled, crimping the papers with a tremor. “Damnation.”
His wife knew.

His one-eyed gaze jerked upward to the windows of their bedchamber. He thought that he caught sight of a cream-colored flutter. The color of the gown his wife had been wearing. She could be looking down on him right now and he would not know it, but his heart did. His heart knew it, and shakily he lifted the papers to his lips and kissed them. Then, he started forward into the mansion to find his wife.

When Radford entered their bedchamber still holding Nia’s poetry in his hand, he could see that his wife was quite discomposed. She fluttered with agitated movements, apparently haphazardly throwing her stocking, garters, and other frilly accessories onto their large four-poster bed.

“I would try to learn about the things that interest you, Radford,” she said, glancing at him, then glancing away as she lifted two mismatched pairs of stocking with jerky movements. “I could talk to you about anything you like, really, if you would just tell me what it is. Help me along. Anything that interests you interests me.”

Radford tilted his head in confusion, raising the papers in his hand higher into view. “You knew,” he stated, in mixed wonder.

Nia tossed down the stocking with a vexed motion. “Of course I know!” She turned partially toward him, then jerked partially away again. “How could I miss that you do not
like
your own wife?! That we never talk!”