Chapter 50
An unexpected calm had come over Emily. She stared at the man holding a pistol in one hand, a mask in the other. Viscount Deptford. The traitor Damien had vowed to protect. The hapless victim who knew the names of every conspirator in England. A man who had used his lineage and advanced age as a weapon to deceive and betray.
“Lady Shalcross,” he said as another figure slipped into the tent behind him. “I am not sure whether I prefer you as a countess or as a gypsy fugitive. Under other circumstances I might have welcomed your subversive tendencies. There might have been in place for you in our revolution. Rare is the gentlewoman who defies convention to make her own future.”
“Why?” she asked, shaking her head.
His long, sallow face creased in a smile. “I do not have time to convince you of the wrongs the aristocracy perpetrates. You need only know that I am the heart of this rebellion. Ardbury was but an artery, and others have already taken his place. In the end only one of us could lead.”
“But my husband risked his life to protect you at the castle,” Emily said.
“My life was never in danger. The hunting accident was a ruse to deceive agents of the Crown and those who refused to follow me. Your husband was the intended victim on the lake. I suspect he was on the verge of realizing the truth.”
“You’re wasting time,” the woman behind him said. It was the maid who had approached Emily at the inn, the maid whom she and Iris had caught at the castle. “We have to escape now, Papa. Either kill her or take her for ransom. We won’t make it through the garden before the fencing display is over if you tarry.”
The viscount held the gun steadily aimed at Emily as the other woman darted forward to grasp her arm. Emily considered her options. She could scream and be immediately silenced by the pistol. Her voice might not even be heard above the applause and shouts that drifted from the garden.
No one in the ballroom would hear her over the band.
She wasn’t about to be taken prisoner. She leaned away from the woman, casting a glance around the tent for a weapon. Her shawl lay across the small table. The long golden fringe glittered in the lamplight.
For the love of heaven, Emily, whatever you do, don’t let the light fall to the straw.
The woman reached for her arm again, and in one impulsive move, Emily grasped the fringe of her shawl and swept it across the table toward the oil lamp. Within moments the straw scattered around the tent erupted into flames. The viscount’s daughter gasped in panic as fire licked the hem of her gown.
She bent at the waist to beat out the flames with her gloves. “Do something!” she cried to the viscount.
He wrenched off his cloak and threw it at her, then backed out onto the terrace from the rear of the tent. Emily stamped out the flames that followed his escape. She was a step away toward freedom when the woman gave a hysterical scream.
Emily could not leave her alone in the fire. She pulled off her wig and started to beat out the burning straw, which by this time had filled the tent with banks of smoke.
Then there were other people crowding around her, tossing buckets on the smoldering mess. She felt herself swept off her feet and carried into the evening air.
“Are you all right?” Damien asked her in an unsteady voice.
She nodded. “It was the viscount. And the maid who isn’t a maid—”
He set her down, taking a last look at her as if to reassure himself she was unhurt before he disappeared from her sight. A moment later another pair of masculine arms enveloped her. She looked up into the blue eyes of the handsome golden-haired marquess, whose authority would have intimidated her at another time. “I am Grayson, my dear. We met earlier in the week.”
As if anyone who had met the Marquess of Sedgecroft once could forget his name.
? ? ?
Damien couldn’t hold her close enough. He didn’t give a damn that they were sitting on a chaise lounge in Grayson’s Italian gallery, an infamous room that everyone who was anyone in society knew had been designed for seduction. He was as oblivious to the family members who hovered about in concern as he was to the Roman statues that stood in the numerous recessed alcoves, candlelight flickering on their sculpted faces.
A footman placed two glasses of sherry on the low Chinese table that sat beside the chaise. Damien drank them both, only to realize they had been refilled before his last swallow went down.
“Are you sure you weren’t hurt?” he asked Emily, burying his face in her tousled hair, the odor of smoke on her skin arousing a fury in him that he fought to hide. “Can you breathe properly?”
He thought he heard her laugh. “Not when you’re crushing the air from my body,” she whispered. “Damien, you have to let me go.”
“No.”
“You have to. I must look a fright.”
“You look beautiful to me,” he said, his throat constricting. “But, then, you always have.”
“Is Deptford dead?” she whispered.
He ground his teeth. “No, but he’ll be tried for treason and that will be the end of him.”
“And his daughter?”
He hesitated. “No one knows if she’ll survive the night. Her injuries were severe.”
“Oh. I can’t believe how fast the fire spread.”
“But you survived. For God’s sake, Emily, don’t ever do anything like this again.”
She drew back slightly. “You aren’t making sense, Damien.”
“Is it any wonder?”
She caressed his cheek. “You’re distraught.”
“Distraught? I’ve lost my mind. I’ll never be the same.”
She glanced up at his three brothers standing in the corner. “I feel fine.”
He expelled a sigh. “I don’t. I should have recognized Deptford right away. It took Iris to identify him from an upstairs window.”
“Shall we go back to the town house?” she suggested gently.
He released her with reluctance, realizing that they had an enrapt audience. “Yes. If that’s what you’d like.”
Her eyes held his. “If it isn’t too much trouble.”
“How can you say that after following me into hell?”
“We escaped, Damien. And you saved more lives than you’ll ever know. Don’t forget that. You overcame evil, and you deserve recognition.”
“Which I am confident he will receive,” Lord Heath said from the doorway.
Damien glanced back at Heath in appreciation, then stood, drawing Emily to her feet. When had he come to need her this desperately? Why had it taken him all these years to find his perfect mate? Because he had not believed, as Emily did, that true love existed? Or because he placed too much value on his achievements to give anyone else the chance to understand that he might not have a heart of gold, but it wasn’t made of stone?
He knew only that his heart belonged to Emily, and if he had lost her tonight it would not be beating now.