Page 23 of The Smuggler’s Escape

Richard bound his cravat around the wound and pinned it tight. “I’ll arrange for the doctor to attend to you.”

“Sure, and he’ll be thrilled to come to my wagon,” Johnny said. “I’ll find someone else, thank you all the same.”

“Your woman will arrange it?”

Johnny scowled. “That’s none of your concern, lad.”

“I’ll send my carpenter over to help you patch up the wagon. You should leave the area until this blows over.”

“I don’t need your carpenter, and I’m not such a coward that I’ll run because of a couple of excisemen.”

Richard bit his tongue on a direct order, which would only get Johnny’s back up. If he could move suspicion away from Noelle, it might center on Johnny, simply because he was Irish, although he would have had even less opportunity than Noelle to steal secrets from Sir William Luttrow.

Damnation. Why in Hades would Noelle play piquet with Luttrow’s wife? The woman didn’t have the brains to play a good game, and was a dead bore as well.

“Seems to me you have enough on your hands with Noelle,” Johnny said. “Told you so.”

“What the devil is that supposed to mean?” Richard retorted.

“You shouldn’t have tupped her before you were married. Told you so at the time.”

Yes, but it wasn’t uncommon to anticipate one’s marriage vows, and Noelle had been as inflamed with passion as Richard. He’d never said a word, of course, but Johnny had worked it out with no more than a look.

“Told you not to offer for her before speaking to your father,” Johnny went on. “Told you to wait a while.”

And he’d been entirely right, damn him.

“And to top it all off, you took a jaunt to the continent and stayed away more than two years.”

I didn’t have a choice. But he wasn’t about to admit that. Johnny was one of the few people whose opinion he valued, but he couldn’t defend himself now. He would have to earn his friend’s respect again—but he had to get Noelle safe first.

The tinker took another swig of whiskey and sighed.

In the silence that followed, Richard’s thoughts traveled back to the day almost two and a half years earlier when he’d wakened in a nightmare, the world pitching and rocking, his head pounding, and his father’s voice barking at him to wake up.

Which he’d done with difficulty, even after realizing that he was on his father’s yacht, baffled as to how he’d got there and why, until his father explained.

How the old man had found out about his tryst with Noelle, Richard wasn’t sure—most likely one of the servants he paid to spy on his son. Before Richard had a chance to announce his intention to marry Noelle, his father had drugged the brandy and bundled him onto the yacht.

“No, you may not marry her,” his father said.

Richard dragged himself to a sitting position. “Why not? I love her!” A stupid thing to say. The old man didn’t understand love. “She’s a lady with a pedigree to equal mine.”

“The daughter of the Vicomte de Vallon is in no way equal to you.”

That made no sense to Richard. “In what possible way? He was an aristocrat—French, I grant you, but we all have French relatives. And her mother—”

“Is the only point in her favor. Mary was a good woman, like her sister Lucretia.” He slammed his fist down on the table. “And that cur de Vallon ran off with her.”

The light began to dawn. “You were rivals for her hand?”

“Rivals? Pah! She favored me.” His father sneered. “No, we fought over a mistress, or would have, if he hadn’t been such a coward. Well. I took care of her.”

Richard’s mind was still muzzy from the drug, but a chill ran through him at this phrase. When his father lost his temper . . . “You killed your mistress?” Just like my spaniel, when I was too young and helpless to stop you.

His father gave a dismissive flick of the wrist. “She was mine. I couldn’t let him have her, so I arranged for her death.”

That explained what Richard had heard about the elopement of Lucretia Tifton’s sister to France, when Lucretia was still a child. Seeing what had happened to the disputed mistress, the Vicomte had eloped with Mary to protect her.