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And so, with a sigh, she told him everything.

She told him how Dowling had snatched her, dragged her away from a ball. She told him how she’d been bound and tossed in a carriage, carried north to the dubious care of the wretched Packards. She explained the parts she only knew secondhand—how the late Duke of Hawkins had hanged for her supposed murder, but how Diana had never believed the matter to be truly settled. She covered how Diana had uncovered Dowling’s duplicity, how Emily had, in turn, learned that the dowager countess had been behind the plot.

She told him of her dropped handkerchief, and her agonizing hope that someone would find it. And then she told him how someone did—how her brother and Frances had come to save her. She told him how excitement over her miraculous return had turned to pity, then scorn, as far as Society had been concerned.

“My father’s a politician,” she said with a shrug. They’d both sat down at some point in the telling. “Reputation is his life. So, he decided I should be married off, found you, and shipped me up here—where, as it turns out, I’d been all along.”

The doubt had been quick to leave Caleb’s expression, replaced by anger and not a bit of incredulity.

“The mill,” he said. “That’s the same bloody mill.”

It wasn’t really a question. Grace shrugged a shoulder.

“And so when you were asking that chatty fellow about it all…?”

“I mainly wanted to know what happened to my abductors, to start,” she confessed. “That’s what troubles me most, in the dreams, you see—I dream I’m back there. I thought maybe if I learned what had happened to them, I’d know I was safe. But then I learned that someone is trying to sell the place—some man, some lord.”

Caleb frowned at the implications of this. Once he had all the information, he was sharp indeed.

“And the man who took ye is dead,” he said, sounding grimly satisfied by this. “And the other one’s a woman—and locked up.”

“And her son, who inherited it all, married my dear friend, so there’s little chance I’d not have heard of it, were he trying to sell it off,” she confirmed.

And then she added the part that had been keeping her up in the night, the part that had led her to walk halfway to the village while asleep, in bare feet and her nightgown.

“Which means,” she said grimly, “that we haven’t got the full story. Someone else is involved.”

CHAPTER 18

There was a kind of vicious, killing calm that overcame Caleb on the battlefield. It was something that had kept him—and the men beneath him, once he’d advanced in the ranks—alive. In the face of seeming insurmountable odds, Caleb kept his head.

He did not feel he was keeping it now.

His wife—his Grace—had been abducted and mistreated foryears. She’d not gone into the details of her confinement in the mill, but he knew the look in her eyes, the one that said she was seeing horrors even if her tone was steady and her back straight.

The man who’d done it was dead—and good. May he burn in hell for eternity, as far as Caleb was concerned.

But the man behind it, the man who had hidden behind a kidnapper and a madwoman—that person was still free, was still unknown.

Caleb was going to find that man, and he was going to make him regret ever having been born.

“I’ll go to London,” he said, his voice sounding distant to his own ears.

A little furrow appeared behind Grace’s brows. That furrow hadn’t been there when she’d been telling her story. That, too, had told him she’d been elsewhere, notwithhim as she was now, as she had been when they were quarreling.

“London?” she asked. “Why?”

“Grace, ye just said it—there’s someone else involved in the attack against ye. We need to find him.”

Her mouth dropped open in a littleOof surprise, and he found this infuriated him all the more.

“But—” she said.

“No,” he said, cutting a swift hand through the air. This time, she didn’t flinch, and it soothed the parts of him that were roaring for vengeance. “I’ll nae listen to any arguments. I’ll not stand for ye to be in danger, Grace.”

She blinked very quickly several times in a row.

“You’d do that?” she asked quietly. “Just for me?”