Chapter Twenty-Six
The boat was hardly moving, Frankie thought. A sailboat needed wind and she could tell by the lazy flap of sails and the curses of the crew that there wasn’t enough. Current alone seemed to be carrying them. She prayed for dead calm and struggled to find a position that would relieve the strain on her shoulders, wrists, and legs.
The daylight was waning when the duke returned to the cabin in something of a temper. She had heard him barking orders at the crew and guessed he wasn’t pleased by their performance. But he took a deep breath and exerted more control before producing a knife and approaching her. He must have seen the way her eyes widened, for he chuckled as she shrank from him. He grabbed her arm and rolled her onto her side to reach her swollen feet and hands. He cut her bonds and ripped away the ropes, then helped her to sit up.
“There. Much better, yes?”
When she had difficulty moving her hands and fingers, he perched beside her on the arm of the sofa and reached for one of her hands. As he rubbed her fingers and palm, blood returned to them along with throbbing pain. It took a moment for her to realize that his touch caused part of it. She yanked her hands away from him to massage them herself.
“My poor fräulein, you have had a bad start to your Flitterwochen
,” he said with a sly smile. “But I will make it better.” He headed to a bar built into the wall cabinets to pour her a glass of water. She was so thirsty that she took the glass eagerly and drank it without thinking what else it might contain.
Toward the bottom of the glass, she stared into the liquid and then stopped drinking.
“No, fräulein, I put nothing in your drink.” He seemed amused as he came to stand over her. “You are a suspicious one.” He lifted her chin on his fingertips, digging his nails into her skin. “I want you awake, Liebling
.” His face tightened as she jerked away. “To enjoy every moment with me.”
“I will enjoy nothing with you,” she said, watching him light a pair of sconces set in gimbals on the walls. The light revealed more details of the handsomely appointed room, but gave her no comfort. “You may as well set me ashore somewhere. I am not now, nor will I ever be yours.”
“You are wrong, my dear.” He strolled across the room toward her, and she felt her heart lurch with dread. “You will learn to crave my touch, my kiss, my admiration. Starting now.”
For such a big man, he could move quickly. Like a dart to a target he grabbed her face in one of his thick hands and ground his mouth against hers. It was a crude imitation of a passionate kiss that practically drowned her in wetness. She pushed him and strained away, but his assault didn’t end until he broke it off himself and stared with what seemed amusement at her reaction.
Her lips felt bruised and throbbed with heat. She tried to slap him but he caught her wrist as if he had expected it.
“You didn’t like my kiss?” he said with false dismay. “Then you must show me what you do like.”
She frowned, not quite certain what he meant, not trusting his demand.
“Kiss me,” he ordered, his eyes lidded with pleasure. “Now
.”
When she refused to move, he produced a sly smile and seized her hand. “You will not obey? Then we will do it my way.”
Again, he mashed her lips with his and then took her lower lip between his teeth, holding her to him by that appalling intimacy until she couldn’t bear it any longer. Desperate to make him release her, she raked her nails down the side of his face. He grabbed his cheek and sat up with his nostrils flared and eyes glittering. She scrambled back on the sofa, thinking he would punish her for that.
“You see? You learn to please me already,” he said, not bothering to hide his arousal. “Love is a battlefield, Liebling
. In the end, you are either victor or vanquished. But ah, the fighting in between . . .”
She flung herself from the sofa and struggled to her feet, feeling light-headed and faintly nauseous.
“That is not love, Ottenberg, it is madness.” She wanted lye soap to scrub the taint of him off her skin. “Whatever you do to me, you will not have my obedience or respect. And sooner or later, I will find a way to be free.”
“We will see about that,” he growled, rising and reaching for her.
She stood, braced and stone-like, as he pulled her against him and pressed another revolting kiss on her. Her first response was to fight back, but she stayed that impulse long enough to realize that was exactly what he wanted.
Her fierce and unmoved calm was a greater disappointment than any resistance she could have mounted. He proved her right when he broke off his assault and shoved her back.
“I will have your passion. And you will marry me.” He touched the red scratches on his face as if savoring them. “And you will be my obedient wife.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it.” She raised her chin.
“Oh, I think you will be grateful to be my bride once you see the alternative.” He backed her toward a door leading into another part of the belowdecks cabins. “Perhaps when we marry we will invite your mother and pretty young sister to my estates in Germany. What was her name again? Sarah? I would love to show her the special delights of my—”
“You leave them alone,” she demanded, panic rising.
“Perhaps.” His eyes burned with passions he had yet to unleash. “Perhaps not. It is up to you.”
He grabbed her against him, binding her with his arms, and forced her through the door and through a passage she could barely see in the growing darkness. There were steps he forced her through and she stumbled and fell through a low opening into water.
“Think on it, my lovely fräulein. There is only one death. But there are thousands of ways to hurt.”
A hatch closed with a metallic clang. She tried to stand up in the darkness and bumped her head. She was somewhere in the ship’s belly. With trepidation, she put out her arms to learn the limits of her prison and discovered cold metal that slanted toward the ship’s pointed keel beneath her feet. Water had collected in the bottom and she prayed it would rise no higher. She found a way to wedge herself on the cold, metal slope and soon began to shiver.
No one knew what had happened to her or where she was, she thought. She was alone and defenseless, at the mercy of a madman who would threaten her family to make her serve his vanity and twisted passions.
In the cold and darkness, she pulled her knees up into the dry part of her skirts and wrapped them with her arms. How had she come to this?
Red’s signature was on those markers, she couldn’t deny that. But the duke said her family was in debt and about to be turned out into the streets. Would Red have wasted all of their wealth and beggared them without so much as a word to her mother?
She thought of Red’s somber moments in Paris, the way he seemed to have something on his mind. She had put it down to his fears for Claire, but now she wondered if it had been more. And the way he’d joked when they went to order a gown for Claire’s wedding—that the couturier shouldn’t assume Red was made of gold—he was just a silver
man. Was that a hint that he worried about money?
Her spirits sank as those dismal thoughts swirled in her head. Ottenberg was despicable, twisted. Hints of it had been there from the beginning, but she had wanted to be fair and, truth be told, she had been fooled by his elegance and courtly manners. “Rottenberg,” Reynard had called him. He had seen beneath the manners and Continental polish to the truth of the man.
Reynard
. An image of his face, his beautiful gray eyes and wry smile, rose in her mind. She recalled his tenderness and determination, his droll sense of humor. One of the things he liked about her, he had confessed, was the way she made up her mind and then took action, no matter how crazy it was.
What could she possibly do to help herself now? If she got out of this water-logged prison—no, when
she got out of here—she would find a way off the ship. Her spirits rebounded. She had to find a way to free herself even if it meant pretending to go along with the duke’s intentions. And when she was free of the duke, she would search for the truth of her family’s finances.
* * *
There was enough rising moon to brighten the water and make boats and barges tied up along the channel plainly visible. Most traffic had stopped for the night, giving their small launch a clear path down the broadening river.
There was so much machinery in the midsection of the motor-driven boat that there was little room for passengers. Reynard sat in the front with his collar up searching the river ahead, while Red huddled in the back watching mad Terrance McGraff tinker with the motor running the boat’s propeller. Grycel, after seeing the vessel, had agreed to stay behind to make a report to Lady Evelyn at the hotel and then to the authorities.
“She’s goin’ swell—got ’er wide open! We’ll catch ’em!” Mad Terrance yelled in order to be heard over the motor. “This beauty’s built to run on kerosene, but I got me own special brew. She’s forty percent faster than a regular Priestman.” He pointed with pride to the open motor belching noise and exhaust. “This here’s the way o’ the future, it is!”
It was the better part of an hour and a half and they had had to refuel the motor with Terrance’s special brew twice before they caught sight of a ship wallowing along in mid-channel. Her sails were deployed and she had running lanterns fore and aft, but the canvas hung limp, leaving the boat at the mercy of the current.
Reynard rolled to his knees and hauled out Terrance’s spyglass for a look. His heart rate picked up as he saw the markings on the pale stern and squinted, concentrating on what looked like a large round letter—an O
.
“It’s them,” he shouted over the motor noise, pointing frantically to the boat in the distance.
“Yeah?” Red looked ready to swim to the ship if necessary. “What’s the plan?”
“We board and go in and get her,” Reynard answered, feeling like an idiot for not coming up with something better. Still, there wasn’t much room for stealth or cleverness when you were trying to catch a sixty-five-foot sloop in a noisy, smoke-belching fourteen-footer with an inebriated Scotsman at the helm. “They’ll hear us coming. Don’t be shy about cracking a skull when you get the chance.”
He looked back and saw Red grinning like a demon. He pulled a weighted truncheon from his jacket and held it up, admiring its mayhem-polished surface. “Courtesy o’ our friend Grycel.”
* * *
“What’s that?” Ottenberg demanded of the crewman at the tiller as he looked back over the stern of his yacht, searching for the source of that noise.
“Sounds like an engine . . . or one of them motorboats,” the fellow said. “What kind of fool would be out on the water in one of them things at ni—”
“Steer toward the banks and let them pass,” Ottenberg snapped.
“But this part of the river—there’s sandbars, an’ the tide’s goin’ out.”
“Steer over and let them pass!”
The wheel turned and within moments, the ship itself was turning toward a stretch of moonlit water outside the channel markers. Seconds later, a small, noisy boat followed their course, steadily closing the gap.
Ottenberg uttered a curse and made his way forward to where his two muscle-bound henchmen lay snoring on the deck. He kicked one and barked orders to see no one boarded. Then he headed back to the main hatch and descended to get a weapon. “This,” he said with a hint of pleasure, though there was no one to hear it, “could be interesting.”
* * *
By the time Reynard tossed a grappling hook over the railing of the yacht and pulled them closer to the larger boat, he was ready to explode into action. He climbed up the rope and was aboard even as Terrance cut the throttle to match the movement of the larger boat. When he turned to give Red a hand, a bull of a man wielding a huge fist appeared out of nowhere and would have knocked him over the railing if he hadn’t ducked. It took some fancy footwork, but he managed to stay out of reach while drawing the brute away to allow Red to climb aboard.
Something knocked him on the head from behind. He remained upright, but saw double, and it took him a minute to realize that he wasn’t just seeing double—there really were
two men the size of mountains coming at him. He retreated along the edge of the deck toward midship.
“Where is she?” he demanded. “Frankie—what did you do with her?”
“Yer fancy piece o’ tail? We dumped ’er overboard some ways back,” one said with a laugh. “Wore out, she was, when we got through wi’ her.”
The taunt was meant to enrage Reynard and it worked. But the pair hadn’t counted Reynard’s experience as a bare-knuckle fighter. When he sprang at the closest one, the brute’s instinct was to scramble back to avoid the punch and he backed right into his twin, who fell backward. Reynard got in two solid blows before the second bruiser got to his feet and went to work on him, too.
* * *
Red had managed to make it to the railing and hung on for dear life, struggling for footing and trying to catch his breath. He could see a nasty ruckus midship as he climbed over the metal railing, and muttered to himself that he’d given up saloon fights long ago. He managed to get his aging bones aboard and held on to the railing as he lumbered to the Fox’s aid.
* * *
The blows this pair could deal were staggering, so the trick was to not let them land, Reynard realized. Sooner or later, that much raw power was going to wear him down. Mobility was their weakness, so he shifted to lower body kicks and found them more successful than straight head or gut punches. He managed a blow to one of the brutes’ knees and sent him pitching sideways, howling. Twice he was clipped on the chin and nearly went down for the count.
Where the hell was Red? Heartbeats later, Frankie’s uncle appeared, smacking Grycel’s lucky truncheon against his palm.
“Better late than never,” Reynard panted, dodging another haymaker.
Red sized up the situation, crept to the side to stay out of sight, and delivered a blow from behind that sent one of the mayhem twins to his knees. It took a second, harder blow to send the man facedown on the deck.
“I take that back—good timing,” Reynard called, bracing for another round as the one still standing channeled his surprise into a grisly roar and a bull rush. Red plunged in and two-on-one evened the odds a bit. By the time the second twin was down, both Reynard and Red were panting and glad to be alive. So, apparently, were the three crewmen Ottenberg had acquired along with the vessel. They surrendered with their hands up and sat wearily on the deck under Red’s watchful eye. The duke, they said, had gone below.
“Come down, Boulton,” the duke’s voice came up the hatch as Reynard paused at the top step. “I prefer to do my killing face-to-face.”
Reynard looked to Red, who gave him a nod, and then descended the steps into the main cabin. Ottenberg stood in the middle of the cabin holding a sword that glinted in the lamplight, but it was the figure on the sofa that claimed his attention.
Frankie sat in a heap of wet skirts with her arms wrapped around her and her sodden feet and shoes propped on the sofa. She was shivering and barely reacted to his presence. Anger ignited in him and he could feel a change come over him, one that separated the man he was from the fury possessing him.
“She will live,” Ottenberg said, then twirled the tip of his blade in a circle aimed at Reynard’s core. “The question is, will you?” He gave an arrogant shrug. “But I am a sporting man, and I recall that I owe you a debt. So, I will give you a chance. Have you ever killed a man with a blade, Boulton?”
Reynard watched the glow of anticipation in the Prussian’s eyes, sensing Ottenberg wanted to draw it out, to savor his control of the moment.
He spoke to Frankie instead. “Are you all right?”
She struggled to focus, then nodded.
“There is something uplifting in sending a true swordsman to his final reward. But you would not understand that. You English—you have lost the art of the blade, and with it have lost your true warriors. Still, I offer you a blade with which to defend yourself.” He glanced at the desk behind him.
Reynard circled him, moving toward the blade, and when he picked it up and felt the grip, the weight, and the balance, he smiled, recognizing the feel of a Burbonne blade. He glanced at Frankie, praying she would understand: “Don’t worry. I’ll get you out of here.”
With that he delivered his first lunge, surprising Ottenberg and sending him crashing back into a small table not bolted to the deck. A moment later, the cabin filled with the ring of blades clashing, but there was not enough room for such a heated battle. Reynard backed to the steps and up them to the deck, parrying Ottenberg’s strokes until he was obliged to leap back from the top steps to avoid injury.
Ottenberg came roaring out of the hatch, stung by Reynard’s unexpected skill with a weapon that he considered to be beyond all but a few.
“Where did you learn the sword?” Ottenberg demanded furiously as they circled each other, each probing for weaknesses in their opponent.
“From Gerard, Marquis de Burbonne. My uncle.” He took pleasure in Ottenberg’s expression, knowing that the duke’s own hubris had betrayed him. “Yes, that
Burbonne. The House of Burbonne. My mother’s family.”
Ottenberg leapt at him with a snarl that combined both anger and fierce pleasure. Reynard scarcely had time to parry, lock their swords, and shove him back. The Prussian’s technique was formidable; he was surprisingly graceful for a man of his size. But Reynard had been trained to the exacting standards of master swordsmen and kept his movements simple and precise. After years of being schooled by the old marquis and his son Henri, Reynard’s subtle precision was as natural as breathing—a perfect strategy with an overconfident opponent who relied on intimidation to enhance his blade work.
At times, their thrusts, slashes, and parries seemed dance-like as they sallied back and forth, but their eyes were deadly serious, filled with a desire for domination . . . victory . . . blood.
In years of blade work, Reynard had never intentionally harmed another swordsman. Occasionally a thrust went too far or a cut fell too quickly in the rhythm of a match, and a halt was called to tend a stab or minor slash. But now, with all his being, he wanted to see Ottenberg done—laid out on the deck and unable to rise—unable to hurt Frankie or any other woman ever again.
As they pivoted and clashed, steel slid against tempered steel to bring them face-to-face. Both wore a grimace of effort, but Ottenberg laughed as he wiped sweat from his eyes and Reynard wanted to finish him all the more.
It was stubborn, uncompromising will that drove Reynard to take greater chances and begin fighting with a cunning that came from the London streets—like a downward strike at Ottenberg’s legs as he rolled his blade through an arc. He drew blood with that one, surprising the duke, but it was not enough to seriously hinder the man’s attacks. With an odd sense of calm, a rightness in his core, he pressed Ottenberg until that smirk of superiority vanished.
Both men were panting, nearing exhaustion yet refusing to yield, when nature provided a nudge in the form of a lowering tide that drove the bow of the boat into a sandbar. A shudder and groan went through the vessel. The deck vibrated and lifted, causing the duke to stumble. He ran into a raised hatch cover and the point of Reynard’s eager blade at the same moment.
Down he went, with a look of surprise and horror at the rapier thrust upward into his chest. Then he looked at Reynard and the spark of fury died in his eyes. He fell forward, running the blade farther up and through his heart. And it was over.
Reynard staggered, exhausted and desperate for air. He grabbed the nearest railing to work his way back to the main hatch. He didn’t see the big man moving quickly across the deck with death in his eyes. One of the duke’s knucklers had recovered enough to desire revenge. He rushed Reynard and was soon hammering him with blows that forced him to the deck. Reynard was nearly unconscious when there was a “crack” and the big man went sprawling on top of him.
When his vision cleared, Reynard pushed that mountain of flesh off him and looked up. There stood Frankie in her French pantalets, holding an oar with both hands and wearing a fierce expression. He’d never been so happy in his life. She was all right! More than all right—she had just saved his worthless hide from a savage beating!
He pushed to his feet, opened his arms, and staggered toward her. She still clutched the oar, even as she flew into his arms and buried her face in his shirtfront. He held her for a moment before recognizing her shuddery movements as shivers and realizing she was still half-frozen. He ushered her back into the cabin, where her wet skirts and petticoats lay in a heap on the floor. He set her down on the sofa, pried the oar from her hands, and disappeared briefly to find blankets to wrap and warm her.
“How is she?” Red called from the steps of the hatchway.
* * *
“She
is j-just f-f ine,” Frankie answered for herself. She was wrapped soundly in blankets and then in Reynard’s arms. She could hardly believe they had found her, saved her. To prove it to herself—right there in front of Red—she pulled Reynard’s head down to hers and he gave her the sweetest, most tender kiss of her life.
It was real, all right.
Relief flooded her as warmth returned to her body and heart and she settled gratefully into his arms. She was almost asleep when she heard Red say, “Better just let her rest. An’ Fox, what do we do with the body?”