“Such a wonderful parental example,” Julian said with bitter sarcasm. “So you're telling me she's gone to Lanjerrick to blackmail Cedric Penhallan into giving her the family diamonds? Does she think Cedric's simply going to hand them over for the asking?” He laughed in scorn.
Gabriel's mouth tightened. “The man's capable of murder, and she knows it. She'll be prepared. But she should never have gone alone!” He drew a harsh, ragged breath. “If those gutter sweepings are there, she'll be one against three of them. They've put their hands on her once-good God, man, you've known them for what they are! You know what they're capable of doing to her?”
So she'd heard that story too. Was there anything she hadn't discovered? Was there ever a moment since they'd first met when she hadn't been plotting and planning, using him? In London, when she'd been lying beneath him, entrancing him with her love play and her soft, lascivious movements, and the luminous glow in her eyes, and the power of her passion… at every moment she'd been pursuing her own lawless, deceitful course. And he'd believed in the truth of her emotions. God help him, he was beginning to find it hard to ignore his own.
Was she intending to leave him once she'd completed her little blackmail? But no, of course not. She needed him to get her back to Spain. She needed him, the blind dupe, to arrange passage for them all. She needed his escort so she could travel with all the safety and trappings of a guest of the British army. And when she was safely home again… why, then she would leave him. She would no longer need him. Had she intended to steal out into the night like the lying thief that she was? Leaving him without a word of explanation?
Abruptly a flash of fear pushed through his corrosive anger. He thought of the twins, of what they would do to her if she could be rendered helpless. And Gabriel said they had put their hands on her once already.
“What do you mean, they've put their hands on her already?”
Gabriel told him the story. “But they're mine, Colonel. Don't you forget that.”
“I have my own scores to settle,” Julian said harshly.
“First with the Penhallans… and then with Tamsyn.”
Gabriel glanced sideways at him in the pale light of the crescent moon. The colonel's face was tight and angry, but there was sorrow behind the anger… the sorrow of a man finally giving up a fight, finally facing unpalatable facts. And it filled Gabriel with deep foreboding. But he could think of nothing to say to repair the damage. Tamsyn said she loved the man, but she'd created this situation, and only she could put it right. Once she was out of whatever danger she'd walked into.
“I'll be going first with the Penhallan,” Gabriel declared, dropping low over his horse's neck, spurring the animal to increase his speed as they approached the out- skirts of Lanjerrick land. “But I'll happily share the pleasure with you, Colonel.”
“We'll go across the cliff top.” Julian turned his horse aside, through a break in the hedge. “I've no mind to approach through the front door on this errand.”
Gabriel followed, and they galloped across the flat turf of the cliff toward the gray house, looming unkempt and unlit out of the darkness.
“Just a minute!” Julian hauled back on the reins.
“There's a light down in the cove. Who would be taking a boat out at this time of night? It's too dark for crabbing. “
They drew rein at the head of the cliff and looked downward. A lantern flickered and wavered on the beach below; the surf crashed and boiled against a rocky outcrop at one side of the cove, before tumbling in a line of foam along the shore.
“We struck gold, Colonel,” Gabriel murmured, swinging off his horse. “I think that's the scum down there.”
“I believe you're right.” Julian too dismounted, and they tethered their mounts to a scraggly thorn bush, bent out of shape by exposure to the blasts of the sea wind. He was filled now with a calm, cold determination. He wanted Tamsyn in his hands, and he would unleash the full force of his bitter hurt… his deep contempt for her lying, cheating, blackmailing soul. But perhaps she wasn't down there on the beach. It was always possible she had carried off her coup and was on her way back to Tregarthan with the Penhallan diamonds tucked in her shirt.
But somehow he knew that wasn't the case. Gesturing to Gabriel, he inched over the cliff top and found the narrow ribbon of path snaking down to the beach through the scree and scrub. It was hidden from the beach by a cliff overhang at the very bottom, and when they reached the overhang, they dropped soundlessly onto the sand, ducking behind a rock to observe the scene.
The twins were sitting on the sand, and a fragrant curl of blue smoke rose from a cigar David was smoking. Between them was a bottle of cognac. Pulled up at the shoreline was a rowboat. They were talking and laughing in low voices, and Julian felt the skin on the back of his neck contract. He'd heard that sound before. He'd seen them like this. Relaxed, satiated. Taking a break before they returned to the cringing, battered little girl who had lain on the grass in front of them.
He stared in cold dread, expecting to see the glint of silver hair against the sand, the diminutive figure, pale and naked, her torn clothes scattered over the ground where they'd been stripped from her body.
But he could see nothing in the wavering light of the lantern on the sand, or the weaker light of the moon.
Gabriel had drawn a knife from his belt, and his gray eyes flickered sideways in a silent message. Julian nodded, his hand closing over his pistol.
They slipped, two powerful wraiths, from the concealment of the rocks and approached the two men.
Tamsyn lay in the bottom of the boat, her nose pressed to the gunwales as she fought wave after wave of nausea. The drug Cedric had given her was wearing off, but her head was still muzzy and the nausea was almost impossible to control. She fought it grimly, dreading the thought of lying in her own vomit, trussed as she was like a Christmas goose. Her hands were tied behind her back and then roped to her ankles. She'd still been unconscious when they'd done that, but not later… when they'd pawed her, opened her shirt, lifted her skirt…
She closed her eyes tightly and hung on through another wave of sickness. So far that was all they'd done. She'd given no sign that she was conscious, and they were going to wait until she came to before they really settled down to enjoy themselves. Charles's drunken slur played in her head, his lewd chuckle as he said that there was no pleasure in necrophilia. David had muttered something about the governor, and then he too had laughed and put his hand roughly inside her shirt. Then they'd left her and she'd heard them on the beach, talking and laughing. They'd come over several times to look at her, and she'd stayed inert, her face pressed against the rough wood of the gunwales as her mind slowly cleared and she tried to think how she was to get out of this particular pickle.
It seemed as insoluble as the situation with Cornichet. Whether rape was a softer alternative to flaying was something she cared not to debate. Her death was the ultimate intention both then and now. If only she didn't feel so sick… but, then, perhaps if she vomited all over the loathsome twins, they'd find her too disgusting even for rape.
It was a possibility. They'd have to lift her out and put her on the sand, since presumably the narrow and awkward shape of the rowboat didn't lend itself to leisurely violation. And presumably they'd have to loosen her bonds. And then, if she was violently sick, it would take them off guard, and if she had some room to maneuver, maybe she could do something.
It was a forlorn plan but all she had. She lay still, listening, waiting for a change in the tempo of their voices, a footfall in the sand that would indicate an approach.
What she heard was a soft, sighing sound, a thump, a shuffling of sand. Then footsteps. Tamsyn struggled onto her back. Moonlight shone on her white face, where beads of sweat dewed her forehead and the hard lines of the timbers were imprinted on her cheek.