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His gaze landed on her. Hard, unyielding. “Don’t even think it, Vicky. You’re not leaving Seahorn.” His glare shifted to Rafe. “And I’ll deal with you later.”
She stifled a growl, snatching her hand off his arm. “The best chance you’ll have at finding Eva is if I come with you.”
“We don’t want your help, Vicky.” His gaze narrowed to slits at her. “Don’t push this. I will lock you up here if that’s what it takes to keep you in place and safe.”
“But you need my help.” Her head shook, her arms folding over her ribcage. “Lachlan will want to hear it from me—exactly what happened.”
Desmond’s voice slowed, like he was talking to a small child. “So you will repeat it all to me, every detail of what you saw, what you heard, where you were, the time of day, the temperature, what direction they were headed—any and everything. You will tell me and I will take it all to Lach.”
She seethed in a breath.Bloody infuriating.She’d just made it across the countryside without grave injury, and now her father thought to lock her away like a fragile glass egg.
She wasn’t going to let him dismiss her so quickly. “But what if I miss something—forget something important to tell you that I don’t know is important—he’ll need to ask me the question.”
Desmond’s hands clamped onto her shoulders. “You did good, Vicky. Getting here as fast as you could. I’m proud of you for that—but you’re not going anywhere now that you’re here. And arguing with me is just slowing us down. We need to go after Eva.”
Damn him. She could be seventy and he would still treat her like an invalid child. Never as an adult. How her father could look at Jules—who in all reality was just as close to her age as his—and treat her with respect and listen to her opinions, but then turn to Victoria and dismiss everything she had to say or think, was impossible to figure.
A child was all she would ever be to him.
A bloody useless child.
But Eva’s life was very likely on the line, and Victoria would do anything to save her.
Which included playing along with this farce of a father-daughter relationship that was somewhat functional when in reality, was far from it.
A sigh at her lips, she started to relay every tiny detail she could remember from the second they knew the carriage had been overrun by the cutthroats.
And then her father left with the Scots to intercept Lachlan. Leaving her in the ironclad cocoon of safety he’d created here at Seahorn.
Ass.
{ Chapter 17 }
Thunk.
Thunk.
Thunk.
A rapid succession of projectiles thumped into something soft. Human flesh?
His senses on high alert, Rafe lightened his footsteps on the cold earth until they made as little sound as possible.
He swore he saw Victoria disappear into the woods surrounding Seahorn on this path. He was up three stories, looking out from an empty room in the castle, and he thought he had orientated himself to the proper direction, but that monstrous pile of stones held mazes that turned one around and around until one didn’t know what was up and what was down.
Last night, it had taken him a half hour to find his way down to the main level from the room he’d been shown to after Victoria’s father had left. Her father and stepmother had been paragons of politeness to him, offering him the comfort of Seahorn for a few days’ rest before he moved onward towardPortsmouth.At least her father had backed off from throwing him indefinitely into the dungeon of this place.
Kind, but a direct hint that Rafe should be moving onward as soon as possible. The offer to stay was clearly put forth for the sake of not upsetting Victoria. Both the earl and countess looked at him with suspicious eyes, wanting to ask, but not having the capacity at the moment to deal with the situation of a wayward daughter that may or may not have been compromised on her journey to Seahorn.
They were right to be suspicious. He had to give them that.
For all Victoria had never once questioned his happenstance upon her on the road after she’d been dumped from the carriage, her father and stepmother were another matter. Both were battle worn before their current domestication. If what Victoria had said about Jules’s past was close to reality, a woman living on the seas for years would have seen much—done much—to survive. And Desmond, well, Rafe knew exactly how Victoria’s father lived his life before settling back in England.
Desmond himself had killed five of Rafe’s men during the battle where Roe and Torrie had killed his father. Three of those men dropped dead to the ground right next to Rafe, their blood splattering onto his face, onto his body.
Not that they were good men, but they were part of his crew, and a body was a body.
All of this, his whole purpose here in England, had come rushing back to him the moment Desmond had come at him in the front foyer.
