The Return of the Prodigal. Кейси Майклс

had chosen to take him with her?

      Who was it, he tried to remember, who first suggested she help him return to his home?

      Most importantly—could he trust her? Could he trust his family’s safety to her?

      “Rian? You stand here like a statue. Are you afraid to leave? Because I will go without you.”

      He looked at her intently. “You’d do that, Lisette? Leave without me?”

      “Absolument!”

      And he relaxed. “I believe you would. What a heartless little creature you are,” he told her, smiling as he depressed the door latch. “Now hush.”

      He stepped into the hallway, listened for a full minute, and then motioned for her to join him. Together, careful to keep to the carpets laid not quite end-to-end along the hallway, they made their way down the long staircase that was broken by a marble landing.

      They were halfway down the remaining stairs when it was Lisette who grabbed his arm, held him back.

      Rian listened, and heard it. Voices, coming from the drawing room directly across the width of the foyer from them.

      French. Two men, speaking French. Well, a fat lot of good that was going to do him, Rian decided, looking to Lisette.

      She put a finger to her lips, leaning her head forward, as if to hear better.

      And then she turned to him, her eyes wide and frightened, her cheeks so suddenly pale he worried that she might be about to faint.

      “Le Comte,” she whispered, and then pressed her hand to her mouth as if holding back a sob.

      Rian looked to the slightly opened doors. Damn. He wanted to see the man for himself. Confront him. Thank him, play the grateful guest—but also confront him. Attempt to take his measure. Measure his motives.

      He started forward, managing to go down two more steps before Lisette nearly tackled him, trying to hold him back.

      “I want to see,” he told her quietly.

      “And me?” she asked him, her whisper fierce. “You’d do this to me? You’d be so cruel?”

      “Damn.” With one last look toward the drawing room, Rian took Lisette’s hand and they made their way quickly and quietly to the large double front doors.

      Lisette’s hands were shaking so badly that Rian took the key from her and inserted it in the lock, alternating his gaze between the lock and the open doors to the drawing room.

      The latch, when it turned, sounded to him like cannonshot.

      They both held their breath. Rian counted to ten, slowly, before he moved once more.

      Then they were outside, the door closed once more behind them, and Lisette was pulling him down the few marble steps to the gravel drive. “Hurry, hurry.”

      This time Rian did shake her off, pushing her as she frantically kept trying to drag him away from the manor house, so that she landed on her rump in the gravel, the portmanteau beside her.

      “Sorry,” he said shortly, moving to his right, toward the well-lit windows that fronted the drawing room. But it was no good, the windows were too high. He stood very still, attempting to marshal his thoughts. Looked all around, for something to stand on. There was nothing.

      Except that tree, on the other side of the gravel drive.

      Rian ran for it, stood beneath it, measured his chances of reaching that first low branch and swinging himself up onto it.

      With two good hands, he could do it easily. With one?

      “Help me,” he told Lisette, who had picked herself up from the gravel and was now glaring at him as she held the portmanteau in one hand and slapped at the back of her skirts with the other.

      “I should murder you,” she told him, still whispering. “You want me in his bed? You’re that cruel?”

      “This is no time for dramatics, Lisette,” he told her, holding back a smile. The woman was livid! She was livid, and he felt alive for the first time in months. “See if you can help boost me up to that first branch. I want to see this host of mine.”

      “No! He is old, he is ugly. He is inconsiderate, coming home a day early. Bâtard. Rian, please. You promised we’d go. We must hire the coach and be gone before sunrise.”

      Rian looked once more to the tree, once more to the windows.

      His good mood soured. He was useless, less than useless. He couldn’t even climb a damn silly tree!

      Lisette was crying softly now, and his decision was made for him.

      No matter what he wondered about the man in the drawing room, Lisette was who she said she was. An innocent, frightened half out of her mind. And his savior. It was enough that he would remember the manor house, be able to guide his brothers back to it once he returned home.

      He held out his hand to Lisette and, together, they began the long walk to the outskirts of Valenciennes.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      LISETTE COLLAPSED ONTO the thin, uncomfortable seat of the hired coach and cursed her papa. She’d been shaking inside for over three hours, and still felt none too steady.

      What had he been thinking?

       To add authenticity to her escape?

      She could still feel the clench in her stomach as she’d heard her papa’s voice, realized he was no more than twenty feet away. And mocking her. The things he’d been saying! Hinting at filthy things, about how he would bed her, teach her how to pleasure a man the way he wanted to be pleasured. And then he’d laughed, both he and his friend Renard, that horrid, sharp-nosed man who made Lisette’s flesh crawl.

      She believed she could understand why he had done what he’d done, said what he’d said. So that she would look truly appalled, and Rian would be given yet another reason to trust her. But did her papa have to say those things to the terrible Renard?

      She disliked her papa’s friends, all of them. They laughed too loudly, they drank too much, and when her papa was not watching, they looked at her too hard. But she didn’t tell her papa that, because these were his crew, he’d told her, and they had been with him from the beginning, in the islands, and they were the only men he could truly trust in a world that each year found a new way to go utterly mad.

      He had other friends, her papa. Important, powerful friends. Like the man, Charles Talleyrand, who had joined them for dinner one night while she had been in Paris with her papa. That man had dressed well, had spoken well, was a gentleman of privilege. But he had also looked at her too hard when Papa wasn’t watching.

      Sister Marie Auguste had been right. Men were no more than a necessary evil.

      “Here now, you’re shivering,” she said, turning to one of those necessary evils, frowning as she saw the perspiration on his brow, the white line around his tightly compressed lips. “I don’t understand this, Rian. You were well, yesterday.”

      “I hadn’t walked for hours in a cold drizzle yesterday,” he said, pulling his cloak more fully around himself. “Two miles, Lisette? It was three miles if it was a step.”

      “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think you’d come with me, if you knew it was that far. But we’re safe now, on our way to the coast, with dawn only an hour behind us. They will have missed me by now, and you as well. How soon do you think they will come looking for us?”

      “I don’t understand much French, Lisette, but I heard the Comte. I heard him say your name, and I listened to the tone in his voice. He’s not going to let you go so easily.”

      “Or you,” Lisette reminded him, lest he tell her they should part ways, so that he could travel home safely, without being chased all