Almost Heaven Read online

  “It’s all a dirty lie, isn’t it?” she said with a calm that belied her rioting feelings.

  “He destroyed my life,” Robert hissed, wrathfully looking at her as if she were the traitor. “And it’s not all a lie. He had me hauled aboard one of his ships, but I escaped in San Delora.”

  Elizabeth drew a shaky breath. “And your back? How did that happen?”

  “I had no money, damn you—nothing but the clothes on my back when I escaped. I sold myself as a bond servant to pay for passage to America,” he flung at her, “and that is how my master dealt with bond servants who sto—who didn’t work fast enough.”

  “You said ‘stole’!” Elizabeth flung back at him in shaking fury. “Don’t lie to me—not again. What about the mines— the mines you talked about—black pits in the ground?”

  “I worked in a mine for a few months,” he gritted, walking toward her with menacing steps.

  Elizabeth snatched up her reticule and stepped back as he grabbed her shoulders in a vicious grip. “I’ve seen unspeakable things, done unspeakable things—and all because I tried to defend your honor while you were playing the slut for that son of a bitch.”

  Elizabeth tried to twist free and couldn’t, and fear began spiraling through her.

  “When I finally made it back here, I picked up a paper and read all about bow my little sister’s been doing the elegant at all the ton parties while I was rotting in a jungle picking sugar cane—”

  “Your little sister,” Elizabeth cried in a shaking voice, “was selling everything we had to pay off your debts, damn you! You’d have landed in debtors’ gaol if you showed your face here before I stripped Havenhurst of everything!” Her voice broke, and she panicked. “Robert, please,” she choked, her tear-brightened eyes searching his hard face. “Please. You’re my brother. And part of what you say is true—I am the reason for much of what’s happened to you. Not Ian, me. He could have done much worse to you if he were truly cruel,” she argued. “He could have turned you over to the authorities. That’s what most men would have done, and you would have spent the rest of your life in a dungeon.”

  His grip tightened, and his jaw was rigid; Elizabeth lost the battle against her tears, and even her battle to hate Robert for what he had planned to do to Ian. Drawing a suffocated breath, she laid her hand against his lean cheek while tears danced in her eyes. “Robert,” she said achingly, “I love you, and I think you love me. If you’re going to stop me from going to London, I’m afraid you’re going to have to kill me to do it.”

  He shoved her backward, as if the touch of her skin suddenly burned his hands, and Elizabeth landed on the bed, still clutching her open reticule. Filled with sorrow for all he had been through, she watched him pace the room like a caged animal. Carefully she pulled all her money out and put it on the bed, then she separated some bills to hire the coach she would need. “Bobby,” she said quietly. She saw his shoulders stiffen at the use of his boyhood nickname. “Please come here.”

  She could see the battle going on in his mind as he continued to pace, then abruptly turned and stalked over to the bed as she stood up. “There’s a small fortune here,” she continued in the same gentle, sad voice. “It’s yours. Use it to go anywhere you want.” She touched his sleeve with her left hand. “Bobby?” she whispered, searching his face. “It’s over. There’ll be no more vengeance. Take the money and leave on the first boat going anywhere.”

  He opened his mouth, and she hastily shook her head. “Don’t tell me where, if that’s what you were going to do. There’ll be questions about you, and if I don’t know the answers, you’ll know you’re safe from me and Ian and even English law.” She saw him swallow repeatedly, his forlorn gaze on the money lying on the bed. “In six months,” she continued, as desperation lent an odd clarity to her thoughts, “I’ll deposit more money into any bank you tell me to use. Put an ad in the Times for Elizabeth—Duncan,” she fabricated hastily, “and I’ll deposit it in the name of whoever signs the ad.”

  When he seemed unable to move, she clutched her reticule tighter. “Bobby, you have to decide now. There’s no time to lose.”

  His throat worked as he struggled to ignore what she was saying, and after an endless minute he sighed harshly, and some of the tension drained from his face. “You always had,” he said in a resigned voice as his eyes roved over her features, “the softest heart.” Without another word he walked over to his valise, threw what few articles of clothing he possessed into it, then snatched the money from the bed.

  Elizabeth blinked back a flood of tears. “Don’t forget,” she whispered hoarsely, “Elizabeth Duncan.”

  He paused with his hand on the door latch and looked back at her. “This is enough.” For a long moment brother and sister looked at each other, knowing it would be the last time; then his lips quirked in an odd little smile of pain. “Good-bye,” he said. “Beth,” he added.

  Not until she saw him striding swiftly past the window of their room, heading for the road that twisted down to the sea, did Elizabeth relax, and then she sagged onto the bed, boneless. She bowed her head, and tears slid down her cheeks, dropping onto the reticule that covered her hand; tears of sorrow mingled with tears of relief and fell from her lashes—but all the tears were for her brother, not for her.

  Because inside the reticule was her pistol.

  And from the moment she realized he might not agree to let her leave, she’d been pointing it at Robert.

  35

  Elizabeth made the four-day journey from Helmshead to London in two and a half days—a feat she managed to accomplish by the expedient, if dangerous and costly, method of paying exorbitant sums to coachmen who reluctantly agreed to drive at night, and by sleeping in the coach. The only pauses in her headlong journey were to change horses, change clothing, and gulp down an occasional meal. Wherever they stopped, everyone from post boys to barmaids talked about the trial of Ian Thornton, Marquess of Kensington.

  As the miles rolled past, day receded into black night and gray dawn, then began the cycle again, and Elizabeth listened to the pounding hooves of the horses and the terrified pounding of her heart.

  At ten o’clock in the morning, six days after Ian’s trial had begun, the dusty coach she’d been traveling in drew up before the Dowager Duchess of Hawthorne’s London town house, and Elizabeth hurtled out of it before the steps were down, tripping on her skirts when she hit the street, then stumbling up the steps and hammering on the door.

  “What in heaven’s name—” the dowager began as she paused in the hall, distracted from her worried pacing by the thundering of the brass knocker.

  The butler opened the door, and Elizabeth rushed past him. “Your Grace!” she panted. “I—”

  “You!” the dowager said, staring woodenly at the disheveled, dusty woman who’d deserted her husband, caused a furor of pain and scandal, and now presented herself looking like a beautiful dust mop in the dowager’s front hall when it was all but too late. “Someone should take a strap to you,” she snapped.

  “Ian will undoubtedly want to attend to that himself, but later. Now I need”—Elizabeth paused, trying to still her panic, to carry out her plan step by step—“I need to get into Westminster. I need your help, because they’ll not want to let a woman into the House of Lords.”

  “The trial is in its sixth day, and I don’t mind telling you it is not going well.”

  “Tell me later!” Elizabeth said in a commanding tone that would have done credit to the dowager herself. “Just think of someone with influence who will get me in there— someone you know. I’ll do the rest once I’m inside.”

  Belatedly, the dowager comprehended that regardless of her unforgivable behavior, Elizabeth was now Ian Thornton’s best hope for acquittal, and she finally galvanized into action. “Faulkner!” she barked, turning to address what seemed to be the staircase.

  “Your grace?” asked the dowager’s personal maid, who materialized on the balcony above.

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