“Your Grace,” he began cautiously, “Her Grace?—”
“Where is she?”
The butler’s throat moved. “She went out, Your Grace.”
Alexander went cold from head to heel. “With whom?”
There was a pause.
“Lord Tilbridge, Your Grace.”
For one terrible moment, the hall vanished around him. He no longer saw the marble underfoot, the polished banister, the faces turning white before him. He saw only Diana stepping into Martin’s carriage because she was hurt and proud and tired and because he himself had driven her to accept comfort wherever she found it.
“How long ago?”
“Less than an hour, Your Grace,” the butler said quickly now, alarmed perhaps by whatever he saw in Alexander’s face. “Perhaps forty minutes. No more.”
Alexander’s heart kicked so violently against his ribs that it almost hurt. “Which direction?”
One of the footmen found his voice first. “West, Your Grace. They turned west at the square.”
Alexander’s mind leapt at once over the city map he knew as instinctively as he knew his own hand.
He pivoted sharply toward the doors, then stopped just long enough to bark, “If Cartwright sends men after me, tell them I have taken the quieter western road beyond the park and not the thoroughfare. And if anyone asks after the Duchess, she is not to be discussed in this house with anyone outside it. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
He was gone before the final word had settled.
The horse flew beneath him. Wind tore at Alexander’s coat and hair. The city began at last to thin around the edges as he pushed farther outward, and with every stretch of quieter road, his dread sharpened.
It was too easy now to imagine her in that carriage. Too easy to see the shape of her body in the shadowed interior, the pale curve of her throat above her gown, the quickened rise and fall of her breath once Martin’s pretense gave way. He knew how trust disappeared from her face because he had done it himself. He knew, too, how beautiful she was when startled, when angry, when flushed with the effort of holding herself together.
The thought of Martin seeing any of it, touching any of it, using her vulnerability to wedge himself closer, sent a wave of such violent possessive fury through Alexander that he had to force his mind back into order.
He wanted her alive. He wanted her furious and safe inhisdrawing room, loathing him if she must, rather than frightened in another man’s grasp.
The road forked ahead.
Alexander slowed only enough to study the marks in the dirt where wheels had passed.
There, a recent carriage, heavier than a gig, the right width, one wheel dragging slightly more on the left where the road dipped.
He leaned down from the saddle, eyes narrowing.Fresh.
Please God, let me be on time.
CHAPTER 27
“I’m saving you,” Martin said, his voice almost tender now, which made the words crawl over Diana’s skin with a horror no raised voice could have matched. “From him, from all of it, from the poison he has poured into your mind until you no longer know what is good for you.”
Diana kept very still.
Her heart was pounding so hard that each beat felt like a blow against her ribs, violent and urgent and dangerously close to betraying the fear she was fighting to keep from her face.
The confined space of the carriage seemed smaller now, tighter, the air heavy with wool, leather, and the faint lingering scent of Martin’s cologne, which she had once associated with harmless familiarity and now thought she might never bear again without nausea.
Opposite her, he looked almost unchanged at first glance. And yet the man she had known was gone so completely that even the shape of his face seemed altered by what had risen through it. His eyes held too much—hunger, certainty, and some dreadful, patient conviction.
