Julia Quinn: To Catch an Heiress

Cough cough cough COUGH. It was murder on her throat, but Caroline wanted to give an espe­cially good performance right as he was coming in.

Then another key started turning in another lock. Blast. She'd forgotten that there were two locks on the door.

Cough cough cough. Hack hack. Cough. GAG.

"Good God! What is that infernal noise?"

Caroline looked up, and if she weren't already mute she would have lost her voice. Her captor had looked dashing and dangerous in the dark, but by day he put Adonis to shame. He seemed somehow larger in the light. Stronger, too, as if his clothing only barely leashed the power of his body. His black hair was neatly trimmed, but an errant lock fell forward to his left eyebrow. And his eyes-they were clear and gray, but that was the only innocent thing about them. They looked like they had seen far too much in their lifetime.

The man grabbed her shoulder, his touch burning through her dress to her skin. She gasped, then cov­ered it up with another cough.

"I believe I told you last night that I have grown weary of your playacting."

She shook her head quickly, grabbed her neck with her hands, then coughed again.

"If you for one moment think that I believe-"

She opened her mouth wide and pointed at her throat.

"I'm not going to look at your throat, you little-"

She pointed again, this time urgently jabbing her finger into her mouth.

"Oh, very well." His lips were clamped into a firm line as he turned on his heel, strode across the room, and wrenched a candle out of its holder. Car­oline watched with undisguised interest as he lit the taper and crossed back to the bed. He sat down next to her, the weight of his body depressing his side of the mattress. She rolled a little toward him and put her hand out to stop her descent.

She connected with his thigh.

COUGH!

She very nearly flew to the other side of the bed.

"Oh, for the love of God, I've been touched by women more appealing and more interested than you," he snapped. "You needn't fear. I may starve the truth out of you, but I won't ravish you."

Oddly enough, Caroline believed him. His incli­nations toward abduction aside, he didn't seem the type to take a woman against her will. In a rather strange sort of way she trusted this man. He could have hurt her- he could even have killed her-but he hadn't. She sensed he had a code of honor and morals that had been absent in her guardians.

"Well?" he demanded.

She inched back toward his end of the bed and placed her hands primly on her lap.

"Open up."

She cleared her throat -as if that were necessary- and opened her mouth. He brought the candle flame close to her face and peered in. After a mo­ment he drew back, and she snapped her mouth closed, staring up at him expectantly.

His face was grim. "It looks as if someone took a razor to your throat, but I expect you know that."

She nodded.

"I suppose you were up all night coughing."

She nodded again.

He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second longer than was necessary before saying, "You have my reluctant admiration for this. Inflicting such pain upon yourself just to escape a few questions shows true dedication to the cause."

Caroline gave him her best expression of outrage.

"Unfortunately -for you, you chose the wrong cause."

All she could manage this time was a blank stare, but it was an honest blank stare. She had no clue what cause he was talking about.

"I'm sure you can still speak."

She shook her head.

"Give it a try." He leaned forward and stared at her so hard she squirmed. "For me."

She shook her head again, this time quickly. Very quickly.

He leaned in even closer, until his nose was al­most resting on hers. 'Try."

No! She opened her mouth, and would have shouted it, but truly, not a sound emerged.

"You really can't speak," he said, sounding wholly surprised.

She tried to shoot him her best what-on-earth-do-you-think-I-would-have-been-trying-to-say-if-I-could-speak look, but she had a feeling that the sentiment was a bit too complex for a single facial expression.

He stood quite suddenly. "I'll return in a mo­ment."

Caroline could do nothing but stare at his back as he left the room.

Blake sighed with irritation as he pushed open the door to his study. Damn, he was getting too old for this. Eight-and-twenty might still be relatively youthful, but seven years with the War Office was enough to leave anyone prematurely tired and weary. He'd seen friends die, his family was always wondering why he continually disappeared for long stretches of time, and his fiancee...

Blake closed his eyes in pain and remorse. Marabelle wasn't his fiancee any longer. She wasn't anyone's fiancee and wasn't likely to become one, buried as she was in her family plot in the Cotswolds.She'd been so young, so beautiful, and so damned brilliant. It had been an amazing thing, really, to fall in love with a woman whose intellect surpassed one's own. Marabelle had been a prodigy of sorts, a genius at languages, and it was for that reason she'd been recruited at such an early age by the War Office.

And then she'd recruited Blake, her longtime neighbor, co-owner of England's best-furnished treehouse, and partner in dancing lessons. They'd grown up together, they'd fallen in love together,

but Marabelle had died alone.

No, Blake thought. That wasn't really true. Mar­abelle had only died. He was the one who'd been left alone.

He'd continued to work for the War Office for several years. He told himself it was to avenge her

death, but he often wondered if it wasn't just be­cause he didn't know what else to do with himself. And his superiors didn't want to let him go. After Marabelle's death, he'd grown reckless. He hadn't much cared whether he lived or died, so he'd taken stupid risks in the name of his country, and those risks had paid off. He'd never failed in any of his missions.

Of course, he'd also been shot at, poisoned, and thrown over the side of a ship, but that didn't bother the War Office as much as the prospect of losing their star agent.

But now Blake was trying to put the anger behind him. There was no way he could bury his pain, but it seemed that he might have a chance to end this consuming hatred for the world that had stolen his true love and best friend. And the only way he could do this was to leave the War Office and at least attempt to lead a normal life.

But first he had to finish this one last case. It had been a traitor like Oliver Prewitt who had been re­sponsible for Marabelle's demise. That traitor had been executed, and Blake was determined that Prewitt, too, would see the gallows.

To do that, however, he had to get some infor­mation out of Carlotta De Leon. Damn the wom­an. He didn't for one minute believe that she'd suddenly developed some strange, dreaded illness that had robbed her of speech. No, the chit had probably sat up half the night coughing her throat raw.

It had almost been worth it, though, just to see her expression of shock when she'd tried to yell,

"No!" at him. He had a feeling she'd expected some sort of sound to come out He chuckled. He hoped her throat burned like the fires of Hades. She de­served no less.

Still, he had a job to do. This assignment would be his last for the War Office, and though he wanted nothing more than to retire permanently to the peace and quiet of Seacrest Manor, he had no inten­tion of letting this mission meet with anything but success.

Carlotta De Leon would talk, and Oliver Prewitt would hang.

And then Blake Ravenscroft would become noth­ing but a boring landed gentleman, destined to live out his life in lonely tranquillity. Perhaps he would take up painting. Or breeding hounds. The possibilities were endless, and endlessly dull.