Her thoughts of the afternoon, terrifying and ecstatic both, narrowed down to one simple prayer.“Please don’t let them all be in there.Please.Please.”
“What was that?”he asked in response to her almost soundless plea.
“Please don’t let them all...”
But it was too much to hope.
With the dinner hour nearly upon them, the parlor was indeed well populated.With a quick scan of the room, Fiona counted fifteen...no, there was Dorian, too.Sixteen heads turning toward them.Sixteen pairs of eyes taking in her torn jacket and stained skirt.Nearly half those eyes—the male ones—narrowed and shifted to Aylesbury with no little accusation.
Couldn’t any of them have managed to go out for the evening?
Aylesbury shifted uneasily next to her, reading the room as readily as she, and this time, it was Fiona who blurted out the truth of it then to spare him.
“A man tried to take me...kidnap me right off the golf course this afternoon.Har– that is, Lord Aylesbury—saved me from him.”
Exclamations rang out around the room.Disbelief.Shock.Angry demands that someone explain.In seconds, she was surrounded by the soft, comforting arms of the MacKintosh women.With six of them present, including Eve’s sister, Kitty, who was as good as another sister-in-law, it took several minutes for her to be passed about, hugged, petted, and worried over before Francis commanded silence, which promptly fell.
Aylesbury firmly separated her from the women and led her to one of the many sofas in the room.The others gathered around them to hear what had happened.
“I feel as if I’m facing the Inquisition,” he whispered in her ear as they sat.“I could use a drink.”
Fiona chuckled under her breath.“Me, too.”
“Who was it then?”Glenrothes stood over them with his arms crossed over his broad chest.
“For goodness sake, Francis,” Eve exclaimed, catching her husband’s hand and drawing him to sit reluctantly beside her.Calm eyes met Fiona’s, and her sister-in-law nodded encouragingly.“Please.Can you tell us what happened?”
“In truth, I wasn’t aware of what was happening until it was almost over,” Fiona confessed, looking to Harry for help.“But H— Aylesbury saw it all.I’m sure he could recount it all far better than I.”
Aylesbury felt Fiona’s cold fingers curl into his palm and squeezed them reassuringly as a tremor shook them.He hadn’t given her much of a chance to think about the kidnapping attempt over the course of the afternoon.No, he had kept her so preoccupied in his arms, leaving her little opportunity to consider the danger she had been in until now.
Now, they were both being given time enough to consider how closely death had brushed by them.
As concisely as possible, he recounted what he had seen and his observations on the events from the time he arrived at Wimbledon Commons until he swept her away.Fiona clung to his hand all the while, her grip tightening at times and becoming almost a death grip as he described warning her attacker off.
“Did you not call out the bobbies?”someone, Tam, Aylesbury thought, asked, and others seconded the question with a low murmur of approval.
“No, at the time, all I could think about was getting Fiona as far away from the bounder as possible,” Aylesbury offered the truth in explanation.“This wasn’t the first time, either.To my knowledge, someone has tried to lure her away or kidnap her outright at least three times before this.”
That revelation prompted a whole new round of exclamations and questioning from Fiona’s rightly-concerned family.He hadn’t informed them of the other attempts to subject her to further trauma but simply because her family cared deeply for her and had a right to know—whether she thought so or not.Aylesbury could only hope that if Piper had been taken by a kidnapper, there was someone—anyone!—with her who could reassure her that she had a brother who loved her.
So Aylesbury continued, telling them about the cabby driver on Regent Street and the incident outside Harrowby’s before ending with the attack at the Empire Theatre the day before.
Other questions were bulleted at them as everyone tried to make sense of it all.He answered as many as he could to spare Fiona any further trauma for the day.Already, he could feel her energy flagging as she began to lean into him.
“Three times, and you said nothing?”Glenrothes glowered at them.
“To be fair, Aylesbury did insist that I tell you, but I thought after what had happened with Preston, it would worry you unfairly,” Fiona said apologetically.“Better me than the children, I thought.I thought I could defend myself or that whoever it is wouldn’t be foolish enough to try to take me in broad daylight.But I was wrong, Francis.I’m sorry for not saying something sooner.”
“Three times, Blossom,” her eldest brother repeated, reaching across the space between them to take her hand.“I’d rather have the choice of worrying needlessly over you than losing you.”
“It wasn’t just the three times,” she confessed, surprising even Aylesbury.“There were others Lord Aylesbury knows nothing about.”She told them about the black carriage she had seen in the park and on the streets several times and about the seer at the exhibition while Aylesbury fumed by her side, knowing she had lied to him.“And I think...I would wager...Do you recall that little girl in the park?”She looked from him to Eve.“That little girl who said she had lost her nanny and needed help finding her?She seemed quite determined that I go with her alone, and when Harry insisted on tagging along, she fled.Do you remember?”
Eve nodded, biting her lip as she looked at her husband, seeking comfort from the thought.“She did seem dead set on leading you off.Do you think there could have been someone waiting for her?For you?”
“Lord Aylesbury thought it might be someone after my purse, but...”She shrugged.
“It was no kidnapper after ransom.It was Ramsay, of course.”
