“It is my duty to protect you,” he said tightly. “You need not offer me your gratitude.”
His sudden coolness felt like a rebuke. “You may put me down now,” she said, her pride reasserting itself now that the danger seemed to have been extinguished for the moment.
“No,” he bit out.
She glanced up at him, finding his wide jaw rigid. “I wish to walk on my own. I do not require you to carry me about as if I am an invalid.”
“The matter is not open for discussion. I am carrying you, and that is final.”
What a stubborn, vexing man. So changeable. One moment, he held her as if she were dear to him, and the next he withdrew even as he insisted upon carrying her back into Burghly House.
She wriggled in his arms, trying to get free. “You do not have the right to order me about. Put me down now, Mr. Ludlow.”
He did not even pause his stride. “Cease squirming or I shall drop you.”
Naturally, she did not heed his warning. Instead, she moved about, pushed at his chest, doing everything in her power to make him release her. But he held firm. She felt as ineffectual as a butterfly flitting about the head of a lion, just as he had once said.
As they re-entered the house, one of his men approached, wearing a forbidding expression. The servants were nowhere in sight, the house eerily silent.
“We have searched the entire home, sir,” said the man. “We cannot find the assailant responsible for stabbing Beauchamps.”
“The young duke,” he barked, never breaking his steady pace. “There are two men guarding him?”
“Aye, sir. Two men at the nursery, another on the ground below watching the perimeter.”
“And Beauchamps?” Clay asked.
“He’s in a bad way. There’s a doctor seeing to him now, sir,” answered the man. “We have also sent word to the Duke of Carlisle. I expect he will be arriving within the half hour.”
“I’ve found the assailant, Farleigh,” Clay said then, apparently satisfied by the reports he’d just received. “He’s in the gardens.”
“In the gardens? Shall I interrogate him, sir?”
“This bird won’t sing, Farleigh,” Clay said harshly. “I am afraid I had no alternative. Perhaps you might see to the body. I would not have the child or an unsuspecting domestic seeing it. Search him for any hint of information.”
“Aye, sir,” chirped the man called Farleigh, heading off in the direction from which they had just come.
Clay was like a general commanding a field of battle, and her glimpse into the man he had become left her shaken. So shaken she forgot temporarily her struggle to be released. Until her wits returned to her, and with them, her outrage. “Release me at once.”
He ignored her, stalking to a small saloon she scarcely ever used, and elbowing the door open. Once they were over the threshold, he kicked the portal closed at his back and released her so suddenly that when her feet met the plush carpet, she almost tumbled backward in a heap of skirts.
Smoothing her dress into place, she glared at his back, for he had turned away from her to pace the length of the chamber. “I am grateful to you for saving my life whether you like it or not. But you, sir, have no right to cart me about. Who do you think you are?”
He spun on his heel, bearing down on her, eyes blazing. The ferocity in his expression stole her breath. “I am the man who just killed for you. The man who is charged with your wellbeing and safety. I have every right to protect you as I see fit.”
“And yet you left me hours ago, with no word of when you would return,” she charged, her shock giving way to anger. Anger was far easier. She could cling to it. Hide herself in it. Wear it like a shield.
“I alone am to blame for this breach, and I know it.” He raked a hand through his hair, looking every inch the dark, dangerous warrior. “I should not have abandoned my post. I would never have done so under ordinary circumstances.”
The reason for his abrupt departure hung between them, unspoken and heavy.
He had discovered he was her son’s father.
But she could not think about the magnitude of her revelation to him now. Not when a man who’d wished to murder her lay dead in the gardens. Not when she had almost been in that man’s place. When she had almost been the one whose blood had spilled. The one who breathed her last breath.
Clay had saved her. And despite his highhandedness, she could not deny he had spared her life today. Without him, she would not be here before him in this small chamber, wanting to kiss him and rail against him.
“I am thankful you returned when you did,” she managed to say softly. “How did you know where to find me?”
