Hold Me Close Read online

  Brayles’ full attention had to stay on controlling the horse, which surely disliked being urged forward so fast on such a treacherous path through darkness and slippery mud, with a double load of riders to pull.

  And so she was sure Brayles didn’t see the remarkable thing she caught sight of—a flash of something pale in the trees up on the ridge off to their left, a little way above them. Something keeping pace with them, even on terrain far rougher than the road.

  It was gone almost as soon as she saw it, vanished behind boulders and branches and leaves. Perhaps she’d only imagined it.

  And yet her heart soared with sudden hope.

  If someone was there, if Lord Edgerton had received her message, and somehow figured out where his brother had taken her…but that seemed too improbable to be believed. How could he know the ledgers had been moved to the Grantleigh dower house? Why would he be looking for her on the river road to Seaton, not out on the main thoroughfare?

  The hope she’d felt thinned to a desperate thread.

  And, yet, if there was any chance, any chance at all that they were being followed, she had to do what she could to help their pursuer keep track of them in the dark.

  Brayles still had the lanterns mostly shuttered, and she had no other source of light. But perhaps she could help give away their location with some noise.

  The road was worsening as the rain fell, and the horse was slowing regardless of Brayles’ impatient urging. If someone was out there, and didn’t have to move quite so quickly through all the obstacles on the ridge, they might even be able to get close enough to make out the words.

  “Tell me something, Mr. Brayles,” she said, using her best social-call enunciation. “Did you know what you were doing, when you were in the pay of the tea-shop man?”

  Brayles shot her an incredulous look. “What?”

  “When you passed on what you heard from military officers of the East India Company, did it occur to you why that man wanted to hear such things so much? Enough that he would give you a great deal of money in exchange?”

  She risked a quick glance back up the ridge, to see if she could spot that flash of movement again. But she saw nothing. Heard nothing but the rain. Damn it all.

  “Does it matter?” Brayles answered scornfully, his eyes back on the road.

  “It does if those secrets were sold to the Pindari, and English soldiers died as a result.”

  Brayles’ fist tightened visibly on the reins, and the tip of his pistol burrowed harder into her side. “I did what I had to do! What difference could it possibly make which Indian factions were most powerful in India—they’re all savages, anyway. No British society will ever be truly secure in such a place. The Indians aren’t capable of civilization.”

  “Lady Eleanor doesn’t think so. Major Holsworth doesn’t think so.” She glanced again up the ridge—still nothing. Had she merely imagined the pale flash? “In fact, just yesterday, he reminded me that India had a great intellectual culture a thousand years before Europe stopped burning witches.”

  “Holsworth is a savage,” Brayles sneered.

  “Holsworth is a man of honor,” she said confidently. “He would never sell his integrity for money. And he would never turn traitor. Unlike you, Mr. Brayles.”

  With a cry of anger, Brayles pulled back hard on the reins, bringing the horse to a skidding stop. “Enough! I’ve heard all I care to hear from you!”

  Please, she thought, as Brayles leapt down from his seat and strode around to her side of the curricle, the pistol constantly trained at her head. Please let someone be out there.

  “Climb down here!” Brayles commanded. “And bring those ledgers.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Come now,” he said, his voice changing to a wheedling tone. “I’ve already made it quite clear I mean you no harm, but I need your help in destroying the evidence against me. I have only one hand free, after all. I want you to undo that bundle, and throw the ledgers, one at a time, over the edge into the water. That’s all.” He waved the pistol at her head. “Do as I say, Lady Grantleigh, and all will be well.”

  Liar. But she had little choice but to do what he said. At least they had stopped now. If anyone was attempting to follow them along that perilous ridge, she could buy a little time. Give them every possible chance to catch up.

  She stepped down from the curricle gracefully, slowly, as a proper lady should. The rain had soaked the linen bundle, so of course she had an excuse to tug and pull and struggle for some moments with the tight, wet knot.

  “Damn you,” said Brayles. “Will you hurry?”

  “I am doing my very best, Mr. Brayles,” she informed him. There was only so long she could drag out the procedure, though, and at last the edges of the linen parted, and she was obliged to pull the ledgers free.

  “Now throw the blasted things,” said Brayles. “And get them well into the water.”

  “It will have to be one at a time,” she said, arching a brow at him, “if you want me to manage that. My arms are not strong. Unlike yours, I’m sure.”

  “Just do it.”

  She made it last as long as she could manage, swinging each one back and forth a few times to build momentum before she sent it sailing out over the embankment into the racing water. But there were only six ledgers, and before she knew it, she was done.

  “Very good,” said Brayles. “Thank you for your assistance, my lady.”

  Trying to keep her calm, she turned to climb back into the curricle, hoping against hope that Brayles would drive her on from here and give her even a few more minutes in which she might have some faint chance of rescue.

  But instead he darted forward and seized her around the waist.

  Oh, God. And still no one had come.

  “Let go of me!” she shouted, as loudly as she could through her terror.

  “I will in a moment,” he said, shoving her closer to the edge. The fingers of his free hand stabbed into her hair, grabbing a thick hank of it and twisting painfully. The pistol was against her temple.

  “For God’s sake, Brayles,” she pleaded, hot tears springing to her eyes. “Don’t shoot me. I’ve done nothing to harm you.”

  “I’m not going to shoot you, my lady. Haven’t I promised that?” But he was pushing her forward, beyond the flat edge of the road, onto the little sliver of rough ground that was all that remained before the sudden plunge. “I can’t have them find you with a bullet in your head.”

  She tried to struggle against his grip, but he was too strong. Her feet were sliding forward, through stones and pebbles that bounced off into the open air, clattering down, down, into the terrible darkness.

  He yanked her head back cruelly, leaning in to whisper in her ear. “Poor Lady Grantleigh, so overcome with grief. Such a sad story. One evening without her widow’s weeds, and she knew there was no more life for her. She rode out into the hills the very next night, and flung herself to a watery death.”

  Damn him. She tried to scrabble with her feet, find some solid purchase she could use to her advantage, but the ground beneath her was all loose stone or slick mud, and she succeeded only in losing one of her slippers, sending it flying out into the void.

  Holsworth had called her formidable, though, and she’d be damned if she’d stop fighting to the last. She owed him that, at least. If nothing else, she could clutch at Brayles’ coat, try to get enough of a grip on it without him realizing to take him tumbling down with her.

  She braced herself for the final push, but still Brayles held her just at the edge, laughing softly in her ear. “Do you wonder, my lady, how I know you only put off your widow’s weeds last night?”

  “I don’t care,” Julia bit out. All at once, she remembered the leather holster strap Brayles wore around his chest. His coat was buttoned over it now, but the high-waisted cutaway style might allow her to shove her fingers under the hem and seize the strap at the final moment. Then he’d have nothing more to gloat about, and at least her de
ath would not be entirely in vain.

  Brayles, for his part, wasn’t deterred by her expressed lack of interest in his explanation. “One of the Grantleigh housemaids has been in my pay for two years now,” he said, quite pleased with himself. “A poor farmer’s daughter, desperate to better her lot in life, eager for a windfall of gold such as I was able to provide.”

  “Does that make you clever?” she asked. The strap dipped to its lowest point on the left, she recalled, just below his waist. If she bent back her right hand just beneath the bottom button of his coat, she ought to be able to hook her fingers around the strap before he was able to fully let her go.

  “But it’s such a satisfying irony, don’t you think?” Brayles said, in lieu of answering her question. “The Grantleighs are so fond of welcoming the lowest of the low into their households. How fitting that they should be brought down by one. The girl was an ignorant thing—she didn’t know enough to inform me of Holsworth’s return, if in fact he did return, and she never could find my ledgers for me—but she did me another fine service. I couldn’t have Lord Grantleigh telling anyone else the details of what he’d seen in those ledgers, now could I? His memory was famously excellent, after all. Who knows who might have interpreted things more cynically than he did?”

  The mention of Christopher got Julia’s attention. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m telling you that this girl, whilst in his lordship’s study, took a substance I sent her and slipped it into his lordship’s brandy, a little at a time. A substance I got from that tea-shop man, as you so quaintly call him. A substance very hard to detect, but which did wonders to weaken an already weak heart…”

  All other thoughts fled from Julia’s mind, and her limbs went limp, cold horror flooding her veins. “Oh, dear God!” she cried. “You mean you killed him! You murdered Christopher!”

  “I did,” said Brayles. And then, his satisfaction apparently complete, his arms tensed violently around her, readying to send her over the edge.

  And in that moment, the world seemed to explode.

  Blinding light and an ear-rending blast shattered the quiet darkness of the night, and the fresh, rain-washed air was suddenly chokingly thick and impossible to breathe.

  The pressure of Brayles’ arms dropped away, and Julia fell helplessly downwards.

  But onto her knees.

  Onto the ground where she’d been standing.

  And it was Brayles who pitched forward, his legs flaying just inches in front of her, and his arms flung wide. And then she watched him falling, far and fast, down the precipice towards the river, his body spinning once through the air as it plunged, before vanishing into the shadows below.

  Julia was stunned, her knees and her palms pressing into the mud and stones there at the edge of the road. She wasn’t falling. She was still breathing, her body all in one piece, unbroken. How was it even possible?

  Then she heard men’s voices, recognized the hovering stink of sulphur, saw an unfamiliar pair of booted legs come out of nowhere to stand where Brayles had been standing only a few seconds before, their owner apparently looking over the edge of the cliff to see just where Brayles had gone. The butt of a rifle swung by his knee.

  And even more miraculously, Holsworth was suddenly there beside her.

  He was kneeling in the very same mud she was, as large and strong and solid as ever, and she could hear his deep, familiar voice murmuring something soft and comforting, and, even through the gunsmoke, she could smell the wonderful scent of his cologne.

  How could it be? How could it be?

  She’d sent him away, far away.

  And she was supposed to be dead.

  But he was there, and he seemed to be quite sure she was alive, because he was spreading a warm coat over her shoulders. And he was pressing kisses into her hair, and pulling her against his body, and wrapping her tight in his arms.

  13

  Marcus lifted Julia from the ground, trying to keep as much of her body as possible covered with his coat, and wishing desperately for a woolen blanket. She was soaked to the skin and badly chilled, and quite obviously in shock.

  That bastard Brayles had nearly killed her.

  Marcus had thought he’d go mad when their path across the ridge was blocked by that sudden huge outcropping of rock, and they’d had to ride far uphill before they found a way around it again.

  If they hadn’t heard her scream, they might never have located her again in time.

  And if Brayles hadn’t stepped sideways just before he went to hurl her off the edge, neither Marcus nor Lord Edgerton would have had a clean shot at the man that wouldn’t have taken Julia’s life as well.

  Edgerton was still frozen at the edge of the drop-off, staring down into the gorge.

  Hard to blame him. It wasn’t every day a man shot his own brother in the back.

  Or watched him plummet to his death.

  Still, George Brayles hadn’t been much to speak of as a brother. And Edgerton wasn’t being terribly useful just standing there.

  “Edgerton!” Marcus called. “We must get Lady Grantleigh back to Grantleigh Hall. She needs dry clothes and a fire, and possibly a physician as well. So if your horses won’t find their way home on their own, tie their leads to the back of the curricle. You must take the reins and drive so I can tend the lady. And give me your damned coat, man. She needs it! Hurry!”

  Edgerton had been a military man, too, once. The battlefield tone seemed to penetrate his trance, and he sprang ably into action.

  Soon they were moving, Edgerton handling the reins expertly, and Marcus was free to turn his full attention to the woman in his arms.

  Julia was very quiet, curled up in his lap, and shivering hard. He arranged the top of Edgeworth’s coat carefully over her head to keep her from losing more heat from there, then slipped his own arms beneath his coat so her could rub her back and chafe her arms, and keep her tight against his chest so his body could warm her.

  At first he was afraid she’d lost consciousness, but then he became aware her fingers were clinging to his shirt. And she was weeping.

  “It’s all right, Julia,” he murmured, pressing his face close to hers. “Everything’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right!” she answered, with surprising tartness, despite her tears, and the fact that her teeth chattered as she spoke.

  And he’d never been so glad to hear a human voice in his life.

  “Of course it’s all right,” he said.

  “No!” she protested. “It’s not! I was so stupid and so wrong! I should have believed you about Brayles. I’m so sorry. More sorry than I can say.”

  Perhaps she wasn’t in shock after all.

  Marcus found himself smiling. Even cold and soaked through and having spent Lord knows how long fighting for her life, she wanted to argue with him.

  “You don’t need apologies with me,” he said. “Not ever. Besides, it’s over now. You’re safe.”

  She sniffled. “I was going to take him down with me, Holsworth. I remembered what you said, about me being formidable. And so I was.”

  He laughed. “You are formidable because you have always been so, Lady Grantleigh, not because I said so.”

  She shook her head stubbornly. He felt the friction of it against his chest, and it made his heart dance. “It gave me courage, though,” she said. “It did. And I wasn’t so afraid.”

  “That’s my girl.” He rubbed his hands more vigorously over her back, relieved to feel that her body wasn’t nearly as cold as it had been at first.

  Suddenly self-conscious, he glanced over at their driver.

  What on earth must Edgerton be thinking there beside them, listening to all this? But either the man was still too lost in thought about his brother to notice, or he wasn’t as horrified as Marcus would have thought at seeing the Countess of Grantleigh seated so comfortably on the lap of the son of a freehold farmer, bantering with him on such intimate terms.

  How ver
y strange.

  But then again, Edgerton had never once tormented him in boyhood. And after Marcus took his commission in the army, Edgerton had always treated him with the same respect he gave to any other officer.

  Maybe there was some hope for them after all.

  “Holsworth,” said Julia from beneath the cover of the coats. “How did you find me? I sent you away! I thought I might never see you again!”

  “Oh, Julia, didn’t you listen to a single word I said this morning? I told you, it was impossible for me to leave you. Impossible, while you were in danger.”

  “But you sent your valet to pack your things!”

  “To move them to the Boar’s Head, no farther. After you ran back to the Hall, I gave him those orders, then got my horse and rode for Edgerton Park. It seemed the most logical place to start looking for Brayles. And, as it turns out, Lord Edgerton believed as I did, that his brother was up to no good.”

  Edgerton shifted a bit uncomfortably in the driving seat. “My apologies, Lady Grantleigh, for the state of my brother’s morals,” he said, then lapsed back into his silence again.

  “Edgerton and I rode out together towards Axminster,” Marcus said, “to see if we could intercept Brayles on one of the roads from London, but soon learned he’d been spotted at an inn there two nights before. We raced back to Grantleigh, thinking he might be trying to break in to get the ledgers. And we found the whole house in an uproar. Apparently, Brayles had been invited in, a guest under your roof. You may imagine the distress I felt at learning that.”

  “It was complicated,” said Julia miserably from beneath the coats.

  “The rest of the household would still have been fast asleep, but they were awakened shortly before we arrived by one of Brayles’ servants arguing with Brayles’ sister over whether or not he’d carry her trunk out to their coach. Unfortunately, by the time Lady Lambert, Lady Eleanor and Mr. Maji made it downstairs, the Brayles family and coach and trunk and all had vanished clean away. And so, even more unfortunately, had you.”