Page 127 of Under Arthur’s Protection

The entire world blurred—the car, the English countryside, the sliver of sun punching through the clouds. We had intel, but we also had a safe-room door to get through. We’d have to go in hotter than I’d expected, but we wouldn’t be doing it blind.

“I can’t guarantee they haven’t added security since then, of course.” Papers moved on his end of the line. He was mobilizing too. “I can count on your discretion?”

I let out a long breath, the first one I remembered taking since running to the car at Tintagel.

My whole life, the Penn name had hung over my head like the sword of Damocles—I was born into power and wealth that could easily destroy me like it had destroyed my parents. My father would have denied it had caused him any harm, but he would have been fooling himself. I’d followed the path he’d set for me, but taken the hardest route, trying to outrun the inevitable suspicion I’d been handed everything.

That had been nothing but pride.

And now it wasn’t my pride I was trying to protect. It was Gwen.

The truth was, I’d put the metaphorical sword there myself. I’d been the one who felt guilty for everything I’d been given. And I was the one who could take the fucking thing down. Using these resources didn’t make me my father. I wasn’t using them for a marriage that photographed well, another car, another house, or a son who was little more than my succession plan.

I was spending the resources on the woman who’d told me I actually understood love.

Love. That’s what I was deploying these resources for.

“Of course you can count on my discretion, Dad.”

“Where are you staging?”

“We’ll be ten minutes out from the estate. I’ll text you. Send me the drawings, and have the men bring extra kit for Lance and me.”

“Both are in progress.” A keyboard clicked somewhere in that enormous office I’d spent my childhood being summoned to. “The men I’m sending don’t exist on my payroll if this goes loud. Spend them accordingly.”

“Understood.”

“And Arthur?” He hesitated, and he was not a man who hesitated. “Get her back first. Decide what she is to you after.”

It was the nearest thing to fatherly advice he’d offered me in a decade. What was I supposed to do with that? “Thanks, Dad.”

I ended the call.

“Well?” Lance said.

“Turns out, the estate has a safe room under the main hall.” On my phone, I explored the local maps for five minutes before choosing where to muster. I sent the location to my father and the GPS in our car. “He’s sending schematics and an off-the-books team.”

Lance nodded thoughtfully. “Tristan will be disappointed.”

“By what?”

“That we’re not the off-the-books team.” He turned a grin on me and laughed.

I smacked him, unable to hold my own laugh back.

He flexed his hands on the wheel, and the joke dropped out of his voice. “We’ll get her back, Arthur.”

I had no doubt. Rick Younge and his thugs were not keeping my woman.

Chapter 39

Gwen

The room they’d locked me inside must have been a steward’s office once, or a housekeeper’s room. A narrow wooden bed, a table with a scarred top, one ladder-backed chair, and a single window facing the sea. Plain as a monk’s cell, in a house that was anything but.

The sprawling red-brick estate rivaled Arthur’s family cottage. It was certainly more ostentatious. On the march in, I’d glimpsed gilded paneling and crystal through one open door, a dining table long enough for twenty through another. And they’d locked me in the one room with nothing in it worth looking at.

Who were these people?