Silk And Seduction Bundle 2. Louise Allen

swiftly and screwed his eyes shut against the clipped, formal language informing her of her stepbrother’s death.

      My God! He sank to the sofa, his head in his hands. Just when she had needed him most, he had not been here. He had gone running off to London, in a stupid attempt to preserve his own pride.

      But what good was his damned dignity if he had lost her?

      He could picture how it must have been. The scene with his father, and then getting news like that. She must have been beside herself to have hurled the vase into the fireplace with such force. And then what? Knowing Midge, she had probably gone charging off without giving a thought to where she was going. Unless there was some particular spot on the estate she had grown fond of. Where she might go to find some kind of solace.

      But then, why had she not returned at nightfall?

      His stomach clenched as he pictured her stumbling down the main stairs, weeping…running out into the woods she loved so much…falling…lying injured and so badly hurt she was unable to rise. And he cursed himself for not spending more time with her. For working so hard to prove himself worthy of the position he would one day fill. For putting his father’s demands before her needs. Now the only people who might know where she might have gone were the twins, with whom she had spent the majority of her time.

      The twins! His father was sending them away, any day now, but they had not gone yet.

      Shooting to his feet, he charged along the corridor and up the stairs to the set of rooms in the attics they inhabited.

      They looked up from where they were kneeling on the floor packing their trunks, when he burst in upon them.

      ‘Do you know where she might have gone?’ he blurted.

      They both looked at the screwed-up piece of paper he was still clutching in his hand.

      ‘Doesn’t it say in her note?’ said Jem, at the exact same moment Tobe said, ‘Just like our mother.’

      ‘What?’ Monty looked from one to the other, in complete bewilderment.

      ‘We’re sorry, Vern,’ said Jem, getting up and wiping his nose on the sleeve of his jacket.

      ‘She betrayed us, too.’

      ‘Getting us banished from Shevington, coz there’s only room for one baby in the nursery!’

      ‘And then running off with her fancy man!’ said Tobe indignantly. ‘If she was gonna do that to you, there was no need to get us sent to school!’

      ‘She has not run off with a fancy man!’ Monty protested. ‘She must have met with an accident. She is out there somewhere.’ He waved his arm towards the window that overlooked their beloved woods. ‘Does she have a favourite place? Somewhere she would go if she was upset?’

      The twins looked at each other and he could see some message pass between them, before Jem looked him straight in the eye and declared, with touching sympathy, ‘Vern, we told you, she’s gone to the Silent Woman to meet her fancy man!’

      ‘Hanging around here for days, he was.’

      ‘And she pretended she didn’t want to see him.’

      ‘But as soon as you left, she went straight off after him like a shot!’

      A new fear gripped Monty as he recalled the dreamy expression on her face, the night he had assaulted her on Lady Carteret’s terrace. Her insistence it had been produced by thinking about some other man. How, a few days ago, she had thrust a letter into the flames and lied about its contents. And how her face had closed up when he had forbidden her to go to London with him.

      He strode towards the window, running the fingers of one hand through his hair, whilst crumpling the letter from her stepbrother in the other.

      He was constantly running up against the spectre of that Other Man!

      But surely, Midge would not just run out on him? She was too honest, too direct to behave in such a sneaky way. And now that she was expecting, too…hell, she knew how much this child meant to everyone at Shevington!

      No, he could not believe she would be so deliberately cruel. She did not have a cruel bone in her body.

      And what was more, he could not believe she could have made love with him with such wild abandon, if any other man was of the least importance to her. She was not the wanton his father painted her! Why, when he thought how embarrassed she became whenever he attempted to take their lovemaking to a new level…

      He rounded on the twins, his eyes narrowing. For some reason, they were lying to him.

      ‘Tell me what has really happened,’ he growled, seizing each of them by one ear. ‘Or so help me I will make you rue the day you were born!’

      ‘Ow, stop it!’

      ‘Let go!’

      ‘Not until you tell me the truth!’

      ‘We have! We have! She’s gone to the Silent Woman!’

      ‘She must have,’ whined Tobe. ‘We took the message from the man on the black horse, and then we saw her running off in the direction of the village!’

      ‘Man on the black horse?’ he said, abruptly letting them go. ‘There really was a man asking to see her? What,’ he asked, dreading their answer, ‘exactly does he look like?’

      ‘Like a Gypsy,’ said Jem without hesitation.

      ‘Yes, he’s got an earring and a dagger in his boot and everything!’

      A chill tied his guts into a knot as he saw, finally, why she had not come back.

      He had not been able to believe Midge could be unfaithful. But he could believe that, in her naiveté, she had gone running off to meet Stephen after the dreadful day she’d had! For she had no idea how dangerous the man was.

      Because he had never warned her.

      He had thought he was shielding her from distress by not telling her how the fiend had abducted Marcus Carlow’s wife. He had not wanted her upset by learning how the devil had plotted to ruin Stanegate’s sister Honoria, either.

      But when he thought of the silken noose Stephen had sent her, as a warning of his intentions, his stomach turned over.

      Dear God, if any harm came to her…

      With a face like thunder, he thrust the twins aside and made straight for the stables. She had already been in his clutches for over a day. But he would find her.

      And heaven help that Gypsy bastard when he did!