Lady Abercairn snickered, and raised her fan to cover her mouth. She waited in front of her landau in a traveling gown. Her husband stood next to her, berating the footmen for not properly securing their trunks to the coach behind them.
He turned at his wife’s laugh, his face darkening when he caught sight of Winnifred. “I take no leave of you or your husband, madam. You deserve no such attentions after the abominable treatment we’ve received. Whenever he sobers up, tell Dunkeld to expect words from me.”
Her heart lurched. She wanted to believe him, desperately so, that her husband lay somewhere sleeping off too much drink. But she didn’t.
“I will find my husband,” she told him. “And you will pay for what you have done.” She could only pray it would be Sin doling out the punishment.
Abercairn snorted and turned for the landau’s door. He moved to hand his wife in, but paused when a hatbox tumbled to the ground from the rear coach. A footman reached for it, his grip slipping from the end of the trunk he held. He readjusted and tried, and failed, to lift the trunk up to the servant kneeling on the luggage rails on the coach’s roof.
“Take care!” Abercairn glared. Another footman rushed over to help, and they managed to heft the trunk to the top of the carriage.
The cheerful yellow-and-pink-striped paper lining the trunk turned Winnifred’s stomach. She recognized the feminine luggage from Lady Abercairn’s arrival. Everything about the woman was outwardly lovely, but her insides didn’t match.
Winnifred frowned. Something about that trunk … She reached for the memory but it slipped through her grasp.
Lady Abercairn disappeared inside the landau, and her husband climbed in after her. Their driver pulled up the steps and shut the door.
Winnifred dragged her gaze back to the top of the coach. A footman strapped everything down and tapped Lady Abercairn’s trunk before hopping down. Winnifred tapped the dirk against her thigh. It was just an obnoxious trunk. She needed to stop thinking about it and find her husband, damn it.
But her gaze turned inexorably back to the yellow-and-pink behemoth, as though drawn with a magnet.
And then it clicked.
What her brain had been trying to tell her.
The trunk was a cheery monstrosity, one that a person could never miss.
And one that hadn’t been in the lord and lady’s chamber when Winnifred had searched it.
“Stop!” She threw up her hand, and the Abercairn’s driver jumped back from the waving blade.
Lord Abercairn lowered the window and poked his red face through. “What now?”
Winnifred raced to the rear of the coach. “Summerset! Help me.”
The earl hurried to her side, his eyebrows drawn together. “What is it?”
“The trunks.” She stabbed the dirk into the side of the carriage and tried to pull herself up with it. “I never checked any of their trunks. Did you?”
“Son of a ….” Without another word, Summerset grabbed her hips and lifted her to the roof, climbing up behind her.
“Get off my carriage!” Abercairn opened the landau’s door and climbed out. “You cannae—”
“Watch us.” Summerset pulled a knife from his boot and cut through the leather straps holding the luggage.
Winnifred wedged the blade of the dirk under the lid of the pink-and-yellow trunk and forced it open. A black superfine men’s coat met her gaze, one replete with a body. Sutton’s face was turned away, but his dark hair identified him.
Summerset pressed his fingers to the baron’s neck. “He lives.”
She pressed a hand to her mouth. It wasn’t Sin, but relief crashed through her nonetheless. If Sutton was here, so was her husband.
“Sutton.” Summerset cut through the ropes around the baron’s wrists and ankles and tugged out the gag. He shook the man’s shoulder. “Can you hear me?”
No response.
Summerset turned. “Tavish, arrest Lord Abercairn. Hold him until we can bring the authorities.”
Winnifred turned to the next trunk, prying it open. She threw the gowns and corsets onto the ground. “Sin!” She scrambled to the edge of the carriage, and Summerset grabbed her wrist, handing her down. “Sin!”
