“Hmm . . . so your return to the ballrooms in search of young ladies is something of a novel endeavor for you.”
“You might say that. But tell me, what of you?”
They’d reached the end of the terrace; halting at the top of the steps leading down to a gravel path, she glanced out into the gloom of the garden. The light thrown by the salon’s windows ended several yards back; the spot where they now stood was enveloped in dense shadows cast by nearby trees.
Drawing her hand from his sleeve and turning to face him, putting her back to the garden, she met his gaze and arched a brow. “What do you want to know?”
“You’re clearly very much at home in this sphere. Do you spend all your time in London?”
Looking into his shadowed face, she smiled. “As a Cynster, I’ve been a part of the ton for all my life, so it’s hardly surprising that I’m at home within its circles. That said, I spend only the months of the Season in town, and perhaps a month during the Little Season. For the rest of the year I’m in the country, either in Somerset, where I was born, or visiting family and friends.”
“Do you prefer the country, or town?”
She paused to think.
He glanced back along the terrace.
Idly following his gaze, she saw the last of the other strolling couples returning inside.
Then he looked at her again, and she refocused on his eyes. “Whether I prefer town or country is not easy to answer. I enjoy being in town with all the associated amusements and entertainments, but if, in the country, I had other things to occupy my time, my energies—other challenges to satisfy me—then I suspect I could be entirely content remaining far from London.”
He looked into her eyes for a long moment, then glanced down and propped his cane against the balustrade. “I have to admit”—straightening, he met her gaze—“that that’s something of a relief.”
“A relief?” She wanted to know, so she asked. “Why?”
He looked into her eyes, and she looked into his. Time seemed, oddly, unexpectedly, to suspend, to thin and stretch. Slowly, gradually, puzzlement rose and grew; she let it show in her eyes.
“My apologies.” The words fell from his lips, soft and low, so deep they were almost a caress.
She frowned. “What for?”
“This.”
Clapping one hand over her lips, wrapping his other arm around her, he picked her up. Holding her against him, he went swiftly down the steps and into the garden.
Shock, complete and absolute, held her frozen as he carried her into the deep shadows under the trees.
Then she erupted.
Behind his hand, she screamed, then wriggled and fought against his hold, but his body was as hard as rock, and the arm locking her against him might as well have been iron for all the give in it. Realizing the futility, she abruptly went boneless, slumping in his hold.
He halted in a small clearing along the path, screened from the house by thick shrubs, and eased her down until her feet touched the gravel; she held to her pretend-faint, waiting for her moment.
He released her suddenly, whipping his hand from her face, but at the same time spinning her around so that she teetered, tottered. Eyes wide, she flung out her arms, wildly tipping as she fought for balance. Raking the darkness—where had he gone?—she steadied, straightened, and sucked in breath to scream—
A silk handkerchief whipped over her head, across her lips and cinched tight; her scream was reduced to a muted shriek. She felt him knot the material at the back of her head. Jerking away, she whirled to face him, simultaneously reaching up to drag the gag away.
He’d moved with her; from behind, he caught both her hands, one in each of his, and drew them out, around, back and down. Ruthlessly locking her wrists in one hand, he held them low, her arms pulled straight, and stepped close behind her; she was about to drop to the ground when his other hand closed about her upper arm. “Don’t fall—you’ll wrench your arms if you do.”
She tensed to struggle again.
“Calm down. Despite all appearances, I’m not going to harm you.”
She responded with a tirade, smothered by the gag; furious, she squirmed, tugged, tried to break free, but that was hopeless. She tried to kick him, but he was too close, and all she was wearing was ballroom slippers. She couldn’t even hit him in the face with the back of her head because he was so tall.
Throughout her efforts, he stood like a rock, his grip on her hands unbreakable.
Her breath coming in pants, the muscles in her arms starting to ache, her hair tumbling around her face and neck, she quieted.
He bent his head, his voice falling through the darkness from above and a little to the side. “I repeat—I’m not going to harm you. I will explain this, but not here, not now. Rest assured I need you hale, whole, and healthy—I’m the last person who would hurt you, or allow anyone else to, either.”
He was supposed to be her hero! She hauled in a huge breath, felt her breasts rise dramatically. While one part of her, the furious, betrayed, ready-to-do-murder-or-at-least-scratch-his-eyes-out part, wasn’t prepared to believe a word he said, the more pragmatic and practical side of her listened to his tone, rather than his words, and suggested that she at least hear him out.
He believed what he was saying.
When she stood and waited, he went on in the same definite and faintly dictatorial tone, “I need to speak with you at far greater length. I’m going to carry you out of this garden and put you in my carriage. No, I’m not going to release you then—I’ll have you driven to my house. We can talk there.”
“Vul-oo-ntt-mm-gum-afa-da?”
Silence, then, “Will I let you go after that?”
She nodded.
He hesitated, then said, “Actually, that depends on you.”
She tried to look back and up at his face. Frowned direfully in that direction. “Wa-sis-sis?”
“You’ll learn all soon enough.” He leaned back, then she felt her shawl being untangled from about her elbows. It slid away.
The next instant, she felt the soft material being looped about her wrists. The fiend was tying her hands with her own shawl! There was nothing she could do to prevent him tugging the binding tight.
Before she could even tense to break free and race back to the house, he bent and swept her off her feet and up into his arms.
She cut off her squeal, squirmed, then realized that his hold, the fingers of one hand perilously close to the side of her breast, the fingers of the other burning her thigh through the silk of her skirts, was best left as it was. She subsided in smoldering silence. And tried to gather her wits enough to think.
The path cut through a small open area; in the faint light, she saw him glance at her face.
She narrowed her eyes, hoped he could feel the fulminating glare she bent on him.
If he did, he gave no sign. “My carriage is in the alley.” Looking ahead, he ducked under a low branch. For all the difficulty he had in carrying her, she might as well have been a small child. “And just so we understand each other, I had no intention of kidnapping you tonight—the soiree was supposed to be purely reconnaissance.” He glanced down at her again. “But you set the stage so perfectly, what was I supposed to do? Not take advantage, let you go, and pray that fate granted me another chance, at some other time?”
So it was her fault he’d kidnapped her?
He stepped out from under the trees, and the faint moonlight touched his face.
Eyes narrowed to shards, from behind the gag she gritted out, “Ou. Ill. Ay. Pfh-is.”
He’d glanced down at her. He studied her face for a moment, then arched his brows and looked ahead. “Indeed. I suspect I will.”
The path ended at a wooden gate set in the garden’s high stone wall. Debenham juggled her, unbolted the gate, swung it open, and carried her through, into the alley that ran beside the house.
A carriage was waiting in the darkness. She glimpsed a coachman on the box and a gro
om jumping down. The latter hurried to open the nearer door.
Trussed and gagged, and in the presence of three large men, she didn’t bother struggling or trying to resist as Debenham, the fiend, lifted her into the coach; he set her on her feet, spoke briefly to his groom, then climbed in after her—which left very little space for her to do anything at all.
One huge hand on her shoulder eased her down until she sat on the leather bench seat. She sniffed. The carriage smelled musty. Was it hired? She glanced at Debenham as he sat across from her; his legs were so long that his knees flanked hers.
Then he bent, captured her feet between his hands, and raised them, tipping her back against the seat. Ignoring her outraged shriek, he swiftly bound her ankles with . . . his groom’s kerchief?
“Mmurgh!” She tried to kick at him, to no avail.
“Wait.” Smoothing down her skirts, he rose; her feet slid to the floor. “If you’ll allow it, I’ll retie your wrists in front of you. Otherwise you’re going to be rather uncomfortable until I get you into my house.”
She glared at him, but, as before, that had less than no effect. She was still trying to make sense of what was happening, as if her wits were still catching up with the action. She couldn’t imagine what he was about; he was supposed to be her hero.
When he simply stood, staring down at her and waiting, making a grumbling, grudging sound—one promising hellish retribution—she swung on the seat and presented him with her bound hands.
He bent over her. She tensed, waited, but in untying her wrists he gave her no chance to wrench one free and strip away her gag; he was large enough, his arms long enough, to reach over and around her. One of her hands in each of his, he brought them forward and retied them even more securely, wrapping and trapping her fingers in the folds of her shawl.
Bah! How the devil was she to get out of this?
Presuming she wanted to get out of this.
The errant thought struck with such disconcerting force that she was momentarily distracted.
Long enough for the fiend to lift down a carriage blanket from the rack above her head, shake it out, solicitously wrap it about her shoulders . . . then he swept her knees up and sideways, tipping her lengthwise onto the seat.
She shrieked, then futilely fought as he ruthlessly wrapped her securely in the blanket, then settled her on her side on the seat, rolled and trussed, her arms held down, her legs straight. “Va-a-ou-ouing?” From her ignominious and utterly helpless position, she scowled blackly up at him.
He stood towering over her, his head bent because he was too tall for the carriage; he looked down at her for a moment, then calmly—in that deep, utterly sinful voice—said, “If you have the slightest sense of self-preservation, you’ll stay as you are. Once the coach starts to move, as it will in a moment, if you try to wriggle you’ll end on the floor. I’m sending you on to the mews behind my house—it’s not far. I’ll rejoin you there as soon as I can.”
He was leaving her? “Wrr-rar-rou-rooing?”
“Back to the soiree. I’ll leave once your disappearance has been noticed and enough people see me still there.” He looked down at her for a moment more, then turned to leave. “Trust me,” he said. “You’ll be perfectly safe.”
He stepped down from the carriage and closed the door.
Straining her ears, she listened to him speak to his coachman. She couldn’t distinguish the direction he gave—that damned voice of his was so smoothly deep—but she heard the coachman’s reply.
“Air, m’lor.”
She froze. Aye, my lord. Except that wasn’t how it had sounded.
The coachman was Scottish. And not from anywhere civilized, like Edinburgh, but from the wilds of Scotland.
A coincidence?
Primitive sensation swept over her nape.
The carriage rocked, then rumbled slowly off. Her mind abruptly racing in a dozen directions, she barely registered the turn out of the narrow alley into a larger street.
Black-haired, large, a nobleman. A face like hewn granite and eyes like ice.
But it couldn’t be. The laird was dead. He’d fallen off a cliff and plunged to his death. They hadn’t found his body yet, but . . .
And Debenham was well known among the ton. He wasn’t Scottish . . . yet she knew several Scotsmen who spoke perfect, unaccented English.
Debenham was known to have a badly damaged knee. No one had mentioned the laird limping along with a cane . . . but Debenham had left his cane on the terrace, and she hadn’t noticed him limping as he’d trapped her and carried her to the carriage.
And his eyes . . . she wouldn’t have said they were cold, not as she’d seen them, but she could imagine that, if he so wished, their expression might grow chilly . . .
She dragged in a strangled breath. She could barely believe what her wits were screaming.
She’d been kidnapped, possibly by the laird.
Definitely by her hero.
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author STEPHANIE LAURENS began writing as an escape from the dry world of professional science, a hobby that quickly became a career. Her novels set in Regency England have captivated readers around the globe, making her one of the romance world’s most beloved and popular authors.
Readers can contact Stephanie via e-mail at
[email protected].
For more information on all of Stephanie’s books, including updates on novels yet to come, visit Stephanie’s website at www.stephanielaurens.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Also by Stephanie Laurens
Cynster Novels
The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae
In Pursuit of Eliza Cynster
Viscount Breckenridge to the Rescue
Temptation and Surrender
Where the Heart Leads
The Taste of Innocence
What Price Love?
The Truth About Love
The Ideal Bride
The Perfect Lover
On a Wicked Dawn
On a Wild Night
The Promise in a Kiss
All About Passion
All About Love
A Secret Love
A Rogue’s Proposal
Scandal’s Bride
A Rake’s Vow
Devil’s Bride
The Black Cobra Quartet
The Reckless Bride
The Brazen Bride
The Elusive Bride
The Untamed Bride
Bastion Club Novels
Mastered By Love
The Edge of Desire
Beyond Seduction
To Distraction
A Fine Passion
A Lady of His Own
A Gentleman’s Honor
The Lady Chosen
Captain Jack’s Woman
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The Seduction of Sebastian Trantor originally appeared in the print anthology It Happened One Season, published in paperback in 2011 by Avon Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Excerpt from The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae copyright © 2012 by Savdek Management Proprietary Ltd.
THE SEDUCTION OF SEBASTIAN TRANTOR. Copyright © 2011 by Savdek Management Proprietary Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or herein
after invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Epub Edition FEBRUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780062122766
FIRST EDITION
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