Page 31 of The Passionate One (McClairen’s Isle #1)

“What do you mean you’re not coming with me?” Phillip’s voice rose. Rhiannon met his gaze sadly. The rain had faded to a soft misting drizzle. Her eyes were as calm and impenetrable as an autumn pool. She did not look like Rhiannon. She looked like a stranger, a sad, pitying stranger both older and wiser than the Rhiannon of Fair Badden. Too wise. He wanted to erase that wisdom from her eyes.

“I can’t go back, Phillip,” she said. “I came because I owed you more than a note, not because I intended to leave with you. I’m so sorry, Phillip. I appreciate it so much that you came here. I only wish I could have spared you the journey.”

“Appreciate?” He shoved his hand through his wet hair. “You appreciate my coming here? That’s all?”

She didn’t reply and he felt the fury that now always seemed to be simmering just beneath the surface of his thoughts boiling forth. “What will you do? Go back to that,” he flung his hand in the direction of the castle, “brothel, and whore for Merrick? Is that what you choose over me?”

If his words hurt her he could find no evidence of it. Her lovely face only grew sadder; her pity became more pronounced.

“It’s no use, Phillip,” she whispered. “Even if I agreed—which I never would—your father would never let us marry and you’d be thankful. Because in your heart, you do not want to marry me.”

“Don’t say that!” His glance slewed back to where his companions waited beneath the dripping trees. Even from a distance, he caught St. John’s disgusted expression and Fortnum’s miserable one. “We can find a way round my father. He’ll come round. As long as we live in Fair Badden, he’ll come to accept it. Why, for God’s sake, he all but chose you to be my bride in the first place!” He tried to deliver a laugh and failed.

She shook her head.

He ignored her rejection, anger overwhelming cautionary reason. The moment Ash Merrick had entered his life, he’d begun destroying it.

God, how he hated the man! thought Phillip. Merrick had turned his world upside down, charmed and mesmerized him, and then betrayed him in the most basic sense. Betrayed them all, Phillip thought, looking back at the others who’d lost money and peace of mind to that dark prince.

Merrick would demonize them no longer.

Phillip grabbed Rhiannon’s arms, hauling her close, vaguely aware that she winced, but too overwrought to care.

“We don’t need to get married in a church,” he said. “We’re in Scotland, dammit. We have only to say the words before a proper witness. We can return to Fair Badden with the deed already done.”

“But I won’t say the words,” Rhiannon answered softly.

He shook her hard, a terrier with a rag, unable to stop himself. “What is it, Rhiannon? Do you think to become mistress of that castle? Don’t you know what Wanton’s Blush is? It’s a byword for perversion.”

She squirmed in his hands. “Phillip, please. You’re hurting me.”

“I don’t care!” he thundered, his roar rising above the gusting wind. “I don’t care. I have been hurt, too!”

She stilled. Her head dipped, but with sadness not shame.

“I know,” she said. “I know. But this isn’t the way, Phillip. This isn’t going to make it stop hurting.”

“Maybe not,” he ground out, “but I won’t let you throw yourself away on him. I couldn’t live with myself if I allowed you to become his creature.”

“Oh, Phillip—”

“He won’t marry you, Rhiannon.” Phillip shook her again, trying to reason with her, well acquainted with the strength of the spell she was under. “He’ll just play with you for as long as you amuse him and then he’ll betray you.”

Her eyes lifted to his, no longer a girl’s unlearned gaze, but one filled with compassionate understanding. He could not look at them. He drew a deep breath through his nostrils.

“I won’t let him have you.”

He dipped and caught her under her hips, tossing her over his shoulder.

“Phillip! No!”

Jaw bulging with determination, he strode back to the others, ignoring her pleas and her vindictives, her flaying arms and thrashing legs. He was a decent man, a good man, and he’d offered her his name. She’d been promised to him. He’d only to get her away from that devil’s influence and everything would return to the way it had been before Merrick. The way it should be.

In front of him, his companions broke from their awed observation and scurried for their mounts, trading roguish smiles and excited murmurs.

And if Phillip felt more ill than victorious, they needn’t know and would never suspect. They’d only know that Rhiannon was his and he would not let her go.

It was late afternoon when Thomas Donne found Ash Merrick and his father outside Carr’s office. Ash’s voice was low, Carr’s expression flat with animosity. No other guests were present. They were readying themselves for the nightly bacchanal.

Donne’s smile thinned with satisfaction. He could not have asked better. He wanted to see Carr’s face when the bastard realized that whatever plan he’d had for Rhiannon had been thwarted. And, Donne admitted, he would not be averse to witnessing some small pain on Ash’s proud, dark countenance when he discovered she’d rejected him in favor of another.

It was little enough revenge against the family that had decimated his own, but small satisfactions were all he would allow himself until he found the means to bring this house down in its entirety. Watt had been a gift, a bit of unanticipated pleasure. How piquant that the situation allowed Donne to maintain his role of pretended friendship even as he delivered the blow.

“Merrick! Lord Carr!” he hailed.

Ash looked up. Carr’s brows rose questioningly.

Donne hastened to their sides, taking care to compose his features into lines of concern. He pulled Watt’s note from his hand pocket. “I just returned from Miss Russell’s suite. I had gone there to ask her if she would care to walk in the conservatory. Her door was ajar. I entered and found this on the floor. I know it does not speak well of me, but I read it. I think you had best read it, too, sir, seeing as how you’re her guardian.

He held the missive out. With a frown, Carr took it. As he read it, his frown disappeared and was replaced by an expression of surprise. Donne waited, his heartbeat thickening with anticipation, careful to reveal none of it. And then—and then—Carr’s face bloomed with pure, unfettered exultation.

Carr looked up, his eyes shimmering with satisfaction. And relief. Stupefied, Donne stared at him, aware that Ash, too, was regarding his father with consternation. Ash snagged the letter from his father’s hands.

“Bloody well good for her.” Carr had managed to rid his expression of pleasure, but he could not erase the gloating quality in his voice. “This is what comes of offering foundling brats a home. Ungrateful baggage.” His gaze settled on Donne. “You saw, didn’t you, Donne? I offered her a home, dressed her like a princess, introduced her to my friends, and she turned her back on it. There was nothing more I could do, was there?”

Donne was so completely offset by Carr’s reaction, he could not think of a reply.

“I couldn’t stop her, could I?” Carr insisted.

“No,” Donne answered.

Carr’s head bobbed up and down. “Well, that’s that then. She’s gone and I still have guests who require my attention.” Carr clapped his hands together, only just refraining from rubbing them together. He strode away on a buoyant step.

Donne watched him go, trying to account for Carr’s reaction. He would have staked his life on the fact that Carr had plotted some ill use for Rhiannon Russell.

He glanced at Ash. His glance stayed and became a stare, riveted by what he saw.

Some small pain. That’s what he had told himself when he’d devised this scene. If Carr’s reaction had lacked evidence of his being injured, Donne’s wishes in regard to Ash had been answered tenfold, a hundred, no, a thousand.

Donne had never before witnessed such raw anguish on a man’s face, a pain so extreme that no mask, no experience with torture, no instruction in endurance, nothing could hide its eviscerating power. It turned Merrick’s eyes to arctic ice and then ashes and then emptiness. Merrick’s hands hung loose at his sides as though he had no power to lift them, as if just the act of standing tested him beyond his measure.

“She’s gone, you say?” Ash’s voice was quiet, empty.

“Yes. Gunna says she walked out early this morning. Hours ago. I found the boy who delivered this message to her.”

“Boy?”

“Andy. Yes.”

He glanced up as though he was having trouble forming cohesive thought. “But you just came from her room,” Ash murmured. “You didn’t mention questioning the boy.”

Donne cursed himself for a fool. “I did not think it advisable to let your father know any more than necessary about her whereabouts. And that’s not the point. Listen, Ash. The lad says Watt was with a great number of men. That they’d camped on the far side of the island. There’s no good going after her. And no point.”

“Yes. I know.”

God help him, he had no stomach for this sport. Ash had been gutted, sure and proper, and Donne saw no sense in playing with the entrails. “She’s out of Carr’s grasp, Ash. That was all you really wanted, wasn’t it?”

Ash turned his head slowly, seeking Donne’s gaze and pithing him with such sudden searing understanding that Donne knew he’d given himself away and revealed himself as an enemy. And he also knew it made no difference to Ash, that nothing made any difference anymore.

Ash turned without a word and walked away, leaving Donne standing alone. He decided then to leave this place and to stay away until his resolve returned, because the long-lost hereditary laird of the McClairen’s did not feel any of his anticipated pleasure in revenge.

Dressed in sumptuous, scandalous scarlet and gold, face painted in a mask of unrivaled beauty, Fia threw herself into that night’s festivities. Abandoned and scintillating, she danced with countless nameless men and flirted with as many more. Throughout Wanton’s Blush, at gaming tables and in back corridors, masculine and feminine voices alike remarked her extreme behavior. She shone with a fascinating sharpness, a diamond newly cut.

When the meat of the night was being served, when strong heads and weak had been plied with their nightly opiate of wine and titillation, Fia heard dimly, like a cricket’s song beneath the squall of a storm, the great clock in the center hall chime the eleventh hour. Calmly, disinterestedly, she removed Lord Hurley’s hand from her naked shoulder and without bothering to explain herself, left him panting and red-faced in a shadowed corner of the conservatory. She walked to her father’s office.

Once there, she looked around to make sure she was alone and then unlocked the door with the key she had stolen earlier that day. She entered. It was dark but she knew this room well. She struck the tinderbox beside the door and lit a lamp on a nearby table.

She did not waste time going over the items lying on Carr’s desk. Instead she moved to the ornate marble mantel and pried her nails into a seam on its top. A thin square of marble came up in her hands, revealing the deep niche where Carr kept his most valued papers.

She did not know what she looked for. Proof, she supposed. One way or another an answer to Donne’s accusation.

Carr had once told Fia that her mother, Janet McClairen, for all her insane loyalties, had been the one woman he’d loved. Fia had believed him for the simple tact that he obviously hadn’t liked loving the woman.

Love, he’d said, clouded the judgment, absconded with reason, and diminished a man’s effectiveness. This was so in keeping with everything she knew about Carr that she’d believed him. But perhaps he’d been a better play-actor than she’d imagined.

She’d always adored her father, even as she feared him, because cold and analytical as he’d been, he’d always been direct with her. Honest. He’d made it their especial bond. Others could be lied to, manipulated, occasionally—and necessarily—hurt through deceit, but he would never use her in such a way. Certainly he would never barter her to the highest bidder like … like a whore.

But perhaps Carr had lied. Perhaps everything he’d told her had been deceits, equivocations, and sophistry told to keep her malleable, to distance her from her brothers because they knew the truth, to keep her shut away from the world while he groomed her for her future … sale.

Perhaps Carr had killed Janet McClairen.

Her mother.

Carefully Fia removed a thick packet of letters and papers and returned to the desk. Carr would be occupied for hours with “subjects.”

She had time to discover the truth. God help her … and perhaps Carr.