To Beguile a Beast (Legend of the Four Soldiers #3)(55)
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt

The carriage came to the last cottage in the village, and she could see a woman cutting flowers in her garden.

She said softly, “His favorite was Helen of Troy, though I didn’t like it much because the ending was so sad. He’d tease me about my name, Helen, and say that someday I’d be as beautiful as Helen of Troy but that I should watch myself because beauty wasn’t always a gift. Sometimes it brought grief. I never thought about it before, but he was right.”

“Why don’t you ask for his help?” Alistair asked.

She looked at him, remembering her father in his gray bobbed wig, his blue eyes laughing as he teased her about Helen of Troy, and then she remembered the last time she saw him. “Because when I last spoke to my mother, when she called me a common trollop and said I was no longer a part of the family, my father was in the room as well. And he didn’t say anything at all. He just turned his face away from me.”

IT WAS HER fault, Abigail thought as she watched Mr. Wiggins snoring in a corner of the duke’s carriage. She should’ve told Mama that Mr. Wiggins knew that they were the duke’s children, that Jamie had shouted their secret at the nasty man one day. You couldn’t blame Jamie. He was too little to realize why they shouldn’t tell. He lay curled against her side now, his hair sweaty and stuck to his forehead from crying. The duke said he couldn’t stand Jamie’s bawling anymore and had mounted a horse at the last inn to ride beside the carriage.

Abigail stroked Jamie’s hair, and he made a funny little noise and burrowed closer to her in his sleep. You couldn’t blame him for crying, either. He was only five, and he missed Mama terribly. He didn’t say it, but Abigail knew he wondered if they’d ever see their mama again. Mr. Wiggins had shouted at Jamie to shut up after the duke had left. She had worried that he might leap across the carriage and hit her brother, but fortunately Jamie had been very tired by then and had suddenly fallen asleep.

She looked out the window now. Outside, green hills rolled by with white sheep dotted here and there as if dropped by a giant hand. Maybe they wouldn’t see Mama again. The duke hadn’t said much to them, besides telling Jamie to stop crying. But she’d heard him tell Mr. Wiggins and the coachman that they were on their way back to London. Would he take them to live with him in his house there?

Abigail wrinkled her nose. No, they were bastards. Bastards were to be hidden away, not taken to live with their fathers. So he’d hide them away somewhere. It would make it very difficult for Mama to find them. But perhaps Sir Alistair would help. Even though she’d not minded Puddles and he’d ruined Sir Alistair’s bag, he’d still help Mama find them, wouldn’t he? Sir Alistair was tall and strong, and she thought he would be very good at finding things, even hidden children.

She was very sorry now that she hadn’t minded Puddles better. Her lips turned down, her face screwed up, and a sob escaped before she could stop it. Stupid! Stupid! She scrubbed angrily at her face. Crying wouldn’t help anything. It’d just make Mr. Wiggins happy if he caught her at it. That thought should’ve made her control the tears, but they wouldn’t stop. They ran down her face whether she wanted them to or not, and she could only muffle the sound in her skirts, hoping Mr. Wiggins wouldn’t wake. And some part of her knew why she was crying, even as she wiped at her face.

It was her fault, all of it. When Mama had taken them from London on that awful journey north and she’d first seen Sir Alistair’s castle, she’d wished in a secret part of her heart that the duke would come and take them back with him.

And now her wish had come true.

IT WASN’T UNTIL they stopped for the night at a small village inn that the problem of traveling together struck Alistair. A man and woman traveling alone together could only be one of three things: a man and his wife, a man and a blood relative, or a man and his mistress. If anything, their relationship was closest to the last. The thought made Alistair scowl. He didn’t like to think himself anything like Lister, yet in a way, had he not used Helen similarly? He’d never even thought about marriage. Perhaps he was as much a cad as the duke.

He watched Helen under his brows. She sat staring worriedly out the carriage window as the hostlers ran to take the horses. Her full color had still not returned from its retreat this morning, and that made up his mind.

“We’ll share a room,” he said.

She glanced at him distractedly. “What?”

“It’s not safe for you to be in a room by yourself.”

She gave him an odd look. “It’s a small country inn. It seems perfectly respectable.”

He could feel his face heat a bit, and his words were rather gruff as a result. “Nonetheless, we’ll present ourselves as Mr. and Mrs. Munroe and stay in the same room.”

And he ended the discussion by descending from the carriage before she could protest farther. The inn did look respectable. A row of old men sat outside the main door, which was blackened with age. There were a fair amount of hostlers and stable boys milling about and gossiping, and in a corner of the yard, a little boy with tousled brown hair played with a kitten. Alistair felt a pain in his chest at the sight. He wasn’t very similar to Jamie, but the boy was of an age.

God, let the children be safe!

He turned back to the carriage to help Helen down, moving his body between her and the sight of the little boy. “Come inside and I’ll see if there’s a private room to be had.”

“Thank you,” she said breathlessly.

He offered her his arm in a husbandly way, and the hesitation before she laid her fingertips on his sleeve was so small that in all probability only he saw it. But he did see and note it. He covered her gloved hand with his and led her into the little inn.

As it turned out, there was indeed a small—very small—private room at the back of the inn. They settled at the rustic table next to a tiny hearth, and very soon thereafter a hot meal of mutton and cabbage arrived.

“Are you sure Lister’s headed to London?” Alistair asked as he cut into his meat. The thought had begun to bother him the last half hour or so; they might be on a wild-goose chase, haring off to London when Lister might have an entirely different destination in mind.

“He has a country estate—several, in fact,” Helen murmured. She was pushing at the food on her plate, but hadn’t taken a bite. “But he spends nearly all his time in London. He hates the country, he says. I suppose he might decide to hide the children elsewhere, but if he came in person to get them, I think he’d want to return to London first.”