The Seduction (50 page)

It was for Juliet.

Too late, she flung up a hand as Lord Edward
raised a dagger and made ready to throw.

Alden had only that slow, nightmare split second
to leap ten feet, to draw a pistol, to shout, to stop time. As he threw himself
toward Juliet, hell seemed to close around him, roaring demonic screams in his
ears, stopping his heart cold in his chest. All he could achieve was the shout:
the last word she would hear on this earth, filled with the entire contents of
his soul.

"Juliet!"

An echoing retort rang in his ears. Eyes wide
with shock, Lord Edward dropped the dagger and crumpled to the ground. Alden
crushed Juliet unharmed in his arms as he stared up into the smoking barrel of
a pistol and another face, contorted with fury: the horseman.

The horseman who had been thundering toward them
all across the pasture, brought from London by one of Alden's messages.

"Lud," Alden said. "It's Hamlet.
Will anyone be left standing at the end of the play besides Horatio?"

"Bastard!" shouted the horseman.
"The bloody bastard!"

Lord Edward writhed on the ground, clutching his
shoulder where blood oozed between his fingers. "Hardcastle? Lud, sir! You
shot me?"

His face murderous, George swung from his horse
and stalked toward the duke's son. Before he reached him, at a signal from the
earl, several of Lord Felton's men caught his arms and held him pinioned. The
earl moved to stand beside his daughter. Juliet glanced at her father and
grasped his arm, allowing Alden to move away, freed for action.

"We are ruined, sir!" George hissed,
staring at Lord Edward.
"Ruined!"
Tugging against the restraining
arms, he thrust his head forward and spat. "Your investment schemes have
proved to be a bloody bubble, sir. Our creditors already know it. Everyone
knows it. Everything has imploded.
Everything!"

"Alas, Mr. Hardcastle," Alden said.
"Lord Edward has already discovered the depth of his own deceptions. Your
news is only confirming it."

"He ruined my business to start with! Set
himself up in competition with my timber trade, ruined me, then offered to
help me out, so he could ruin me more completely." George swung his head
back toward the duke's son. "They're after us for fraud, sir, and
embezzlement. Ι could hang."

"Then hang, sir!" Lord Edward retched
once into the dirt. "And curse your father's ignoble blood, which won't
protect you from the gallows."

"Damme, sir! If we hang, we hang
together!" shouted George.

"Alas, whatever he has done, they will not
hang a peer's son, Mr. Hardcastle, but they might hang you," Alden said.
"However, if you leave now for France, you may yet escape the noose.
Though not before you and Ι settle a few differences, of course."

Blood seeped steadily between the long fingers
clenched on the pink coat, yet with mad defiance, Lord Edward laughed and sat
up. "You would duel with scum like that, Gracechurch?"

"Lud, sir," Alden said with the lift of
one brow. "Sooner than Ι would duel with scum like you."

The duke's son sprang back to his feet, sunlight
blazing from his now drawn sword. For a moment he stood poised, that lethal,
practiced fencing partner, one of the best swordsmen in England. Yet he was
losing blood, his cuff stained red, his sword hilt slick in his palm.

Purely in self-defense, Alden's own blade hissed
into his hand. Yet with a short bow, he gestured as if to throw the rapier
aside. "1
never
duel with a bleeding man, Lord Edward. It makes him
mean - and it removes all the art from the game."

Face glassy, ignoring Alden's undefended stance,
Lord Edward thrust hard for the heart.

Alden parried and sidestepped. At his enemy's
next lunge, he disarmed him. Scooping up both the dropped rapier and dagger,
Alden threw the weapons aside, where one of the menservants gathered them, then
began to toss his own sword to Lord Felton.

Yet as he turned, Juliet screamed. Lord Edward
had grabbed the handle of an abandoned pick. He swung it with mad strength, the
heavy steel dull, spattering mud. Alden's rapier shattered, blade severed from
the guard, the shock of it numbing his arm to the shoulder as he barely
deflected the blow. He ducked, snatched, and averted the next strike with a shove1.

"Faith, sir, a most original choice of
weapons." Alden dodged again as the pick crashed past his head. "What
about a duel with scythes?"

"Fight me, damn you!" Lord Edward
shouted, though his sleeve bloomed with red poppies, streaming to the wrist.

"Get well, sir," Alden said kindly,
"and Ι will meet you in a hay meadow. Ι guarantee to best you by
the third windrow."

Metal rang again as Alden snared the head of the
pick with his shovel. He twisted hard. The pick fell to the ground.

Lord Edward sank to his knees as if his
puppetmaster had severed his strings. "Ι should have poisoned you
like vermin-" he began, but he looked over his shoulder and grinned like a
death mask.

George had wrenched away from his gaping captors.
Before anyone could stop him, he launched himself at Lord Edward and flung him
td the ground. As George's fist crashed into his injured shoulder, the duke's
son shrieked once and fainted.

"Scum?" George shouted.
"Scum!" Without compunction, he reared up on both knees, grabbed a
rock from the dirt pile and brought it down with a sickening crash on Lord
Edward's naked head.

Alden leaped, pinning George down with one knee
and trap ping the man's arms behind his back. He wrenched off his cravat and
used the strip of linen to bind George's hands, before handing him back into
the custody of Lord Felton's men.

"Lud, Mr. Hardcastle," he said.
"You have just murdered the son of a peer of the realm. Ι am damned
sorry for it, because once he was fit - I had every intention of murdering him
myself." He dusted off his palms with a fresh handkerchief and bit back
real anger. "Though I'm damned if Ι would have slaughtered an injured
man in front of my wife."

Her back rigid, her hair rich in the now bright
morning sun, Juliet had pressed one hand to her mouth and spun about to walk
away, followed by Alden's silent, agonized apologies: that he had relied on
those heedless menservants, had not seen this coming and prevented it.

George glanced after her. "The damned whore!
She's no bloody wife to me!" He swung his head. "When we first
married, she tupped me like a sailor's doxy, but now she won't even f-"

Lord Felton brought his stick down across
George's mouth. Alden caught the earl by the arm. "Enough death, perhaps,
for one morning? Ι didn't mean that business about Hamlet literally. Mr.
Hardcastle is distraught over his financial losses. He did not intend to become
a murderer."

Lord Felton turned to Alden, his face set in
lines of command, a peer of the realm witnessing mayhem in his own domain.
"Yet murder is what happened. You
 
planned all this, what? When you sent me that letter asking me to come
out here this morning - intercept Lord Edward and his men, meet my daughter
again - you had all this planned?"

Alden glanced at George. Blood welled from a cut
on the man’s handsome face.
Planned?
Not quite. It was an odd feeling,
as if dice rattled in his brain.

"Ι wanted to see Mr. Hardcastle face
the wrath of the law over his fraudulent investment schemes. Ι hoped that,
brought to extremity, he would agree to a more reasonable divorce. Ι
meant to pay him enough to live in comfort in France."

Lord Felton pointed to the duke's son. "And
Lord Edward, sir, who now lies there a corpse?"

"Ι hoped to see Lord Edward prove
himself capable of the outright theft of a treasure with yourself as
eyewitness, to show what kind of man he really was, to ruin him in society,
with his family and with his creditors. Ι wanted to shame him, embarrass
him, then Ι hoped to dispatch him myself in a duel."

"So you did intend his death," Lord
Felton said baldly.

"Ι intended his death," Alden
replied. "But not like this."

"Then it was at the risk of his own,"
Juliet said. "Lord Edward Vane was known to be a demon with a blade."
She shuddered suddenly, walked off to a low part of the crumbling brick wall
and sat down.

Lord Felton glanced back at Alden and studied his
face. "Ι have not forgotten the suit you pressed for in your letter,
sir, but as of this moment she is still a married woman." He indicated the
scene, the crumpled form of Lord Edward, George in the hands of his servants.
"Ι do not entirely lay the blame for all this at your door,
Gracechurch, but Ι think my daughter and Ι need some time, sir. Five
years to make up for, what? Her home, while her husband still lives, is here at
Felton Hall with me."

"Of course," Alden said. "In the
circumstances. If that is her choice-"

Juliet sat with both hands over her eyes.
"Ι will stay here with you, Father."

The earl shook his head and stared off toward
Felton Hall. "Ι wanted a duke's son for her, my only daughter.
Perhaps a viscount will do, but I'm damned if she'll marry a commoner a second
time."

"A great disadvantage to be born without a
title," Alden said dryly. He closed Lord Edward's eyes, before draping his
own waistcoat over his enemy's face.

George licked his split lip and laughed.
"Then look to your own title,
Lord
Gracechurch! Lord Edward told
me. He thought it was the greatest joke of all. He was saving it to throw in
your face when the time was right: my marriage may have been a sham, but your
precious brother's was real enough and so is his son's existence. What about
that?
"

"What son?" Alden stared at him.
"What marriage?"

George spat.

"What marriage?"

"You’ll not find out from me,
my lord,
"
George replied. "But you might ask your mother."

Lord Felton signaled to the servants. "What
the devil is he
    
talking about? Take
the damned fellow away."

George was dragged off across the pasture.

His son's existence. His son's existence.
Alden bent to gather the handkerchief with the
toy soldiers. He walked up to Juliet and set them in her hands. Α wealth
of words were needed, too many to speak.

"Ι understand. You must give this time
to your father. Ι shall go back to Gracechurch to uncover whatever truth
Ι may."

She looked up and met his gaze. He thought her
soul lay in her eyes.

"The truth between us will not change,"
she said. "Whatever the world offers."

Lord Felton walked up to his daughter and held
out his arm. Alden bowed and stepped back. With her back straight and her chin
high, Juliet placed her hand on her father' s sleeve and allowed him to lead
her away toward Felton Hall.

Alden stood by the gaping hole in the ground, the
oddly decorative body of the duke's son at his feet, and watched them leave.

JULIET FELT Α DEVASTATING NAUSEA:
NUMB AS
IF Ι HAD BEEN beaten with sticks.
George had murdered Lord Edward. She
ought to have been glad. The fear she had lived with for five years had been
lifted. Yet to see one's enemy slain before one's eyes by one's husband was not
something she ever wanted to see again -and now George would be hanged. Dragged
before a court, found guilty of murder and forced to walk to the scaffold to
kick away his last breath before a jeering crowd.

Yet he had saved her life.

She had never really loved him, but George had
won her first girlish infatuation. They had shared a bed, in pleasure, in real
passion. Though he had proved to be weak and spiteful, she had never thought he
was evil. What was she to believe now? That she had been seduced by a murderer,
or that all men were capable of murder, given enough provocation?

Meanwhile, she had left Alden standing by the
spring, to return to her childhood home with her father. She had valued these
days, awkward conversations with the earl, weeping once in his presence, only
to look up to see his eyes filled also with tears. They
had lost a wife and son,
a mother and brother, and then lost five years
in
bitter separation. Her father, to
ο
, had been taken
ill
after the accident. He had not known she lay near
death at an
inn
.
By
the time he discovered that George had abandoned her,
she had already disappeared into Miss Parrett's care.

They had to make
up
all that time and rediscover each other.

It was as if she had
slept away those days
in
Manston Mingate, until
Alden had forced her to wake
up
and live again. Unfortunately,
living was painful as well as exciting. Difficult as well as fulfilling.

Juliet must take this
time for her father, but what was she to do about the man that she loved and
the harsh fact that she was still married, though her husband now rotted
in
the town jail awaiting the assizes? And what of
George's odd threat, that Alden was not truly Lord Gracechurch? That his
brother Gregory had left a legitimate son?