Her fingers grazed fabric. Thank goodness. “Got you!” she called gaily.
“No.” A hand clamped down on her forearm, swinging her around. Her back was pressed to someone’s chest, her arms pinned behind her. “I’ve got you.”
She could feel herself being pulled. Gravel skittered beneath her slippers and boxwood plucked at the fabric of her dress.
“That’s not the way the game works,” she protested, struggling against his grip. “Who is this?”
Her captor yanked her back against him, hard, so hard that she could feel the breath knocked out of her.
“We’re playing my game now,” he said harshly. She could feel his breath, hot even through the silk of the hood, heavy and rasping. Something sharp pricked against her neck.
Fear trickled down Arabella’s spine, colder than the frost on the statues. She didn’t need to see it to know that this was no paper scimitar this time. She could feel the prick of steel, real steel this time, against her jaw.
“Where is it?” he hissed. “Where is the list?”
Chapter 22
“Care to place a wager, Fitzhugh?”
Turnip wandered into the masculine province of the red salon, which Henry Innes’s lot appeared to have taken over as their personal playground. Henry Innes was sprawled by the hearth, the claret decanter beside him on the rug, along with a plate of cheese and cold meats. Freddy Staines was dicing with Darius Danforth at a table in the corner, while Sir Francis Medmenham lounged with one elbow on the mantel, where the flames could cast a suitably diabolical glow over his attire.
Martin Frobisher had possession of the wager book. He flapped it in Turnip’s general direction. “Last chance to place a bet.”
“On what?” asked Turnip, without interest.
They had already tried to get him to participate in a wager to see how many times he could hop around the long gallery with a glass of port balanced on his head. Turnip had said no. He didn’t particularly like port.
Frobisher smirked. “It was quite the prank, if I do say so myself. Wish I could take credit, but it was Danforth’s idea — or maybe Miss Ponsonby’s.”
“What was?” Turnip wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it. If it had been Miss Ponsonby’s doing, it was sure to be mean-spirited.
“Pretending we were going to play blind man’s buff. We got one of the ladies — that quiet one — to play hoodsman, spun her around a few times, and left her. Bet you she’s still blundering around out there, wondering why she can’t find anyone.”
Something about the way Frobisher said “that quiet one” made Turnip’s shoulder muscles tense. “Which lady?”
Frobisher tapped his pen against the betting book, adding a few blots to the ones already enshrined within its hallowed cover. “Miss, er...”
“Dempsey?” Turnip could hardly hear his own voice for the roaring in his ears.
Unaware that his hours on the earth were now numbered, Frobisher looked smug. “That’s the one. We’re all taking bets on how long it will take her to figure it out.” Frobisher consulted the book. “Staines says five minutes; I give her ten. Danforth is down for eight.” He paused with his pen poised over the betting book. “What do you say, Fitzhugh?”
Turnip made a low, growling noise. He hadn’t known he had it in him to growl. He also hadn’t known he had homicidal tendencies. Funny, the things one found out about oneself.
“Was that nine?” asked Frobisher, busily scribbling.
Turnip realized he had two choices. He could throttle Frobisher or he could rescue Arabella. Much as he wanted to, he couldn’t do both.
Throttling Frobisher would have to wait.
As he stormed out of the room, he could hear Sir Francis Medmenham’s drawling voice behind him, deliberately pitched so he could hear it. “By Jove, I believe the man is charging off to rescue her. Pity no one informed him that knight errantry is passé.”
The temperature had dropped again. Turnip felt the nip of it straight through his linen, all the way down to his skin. His temper smoldered at the thought of Arabella being deliberately stranded outside in it. She would find her way out eventually, but it was cruel — cruel and vicious. He boiled with impotent anger as he marched down the garden steps. Frost crunched beneath his boots.
He heard her before he saw her, a scuffle of footsteps against the gravel, the sound of fabric scraping against the boxwood.
She stumbled into the clearing. There a piece of purple silk tied across her eyes, tied so tightly that her hair bulged above it. Her glove-less hands were a pale blue with cold, crisscrossed with scratches from the needle-like foliage of the shrubbery. There was a rent in her dress, an odd slice in one sleeve as though the fabric had been parted with a knife. She was tugging at the hood as she ran, skidding on the pebbles and banging into the boxwood as she attempted to yank the fabric up over her eyes.
Turnip winced at the sight. When he got his hands on Frobisher and the rest...
Blindly fighting with the hood, Arabella careened into him, banging heavily into his chest.
Turnip’s hands automatically reached out to close around her shoulders.
“No!” She struggled against his grasp. “I don’t have it! I tell you, I don’t have it! Go away!”
“Arabella? Arabella!”
He didn’t want to let go for fear she would unbalance herself, but it was proving deuced difficult to hold on to her. She was wriggling like a mad thing.
“Arabella, it’s me.” Turnip raised his voice to a bellow. “Me! Ouch!”
She stopped trying to stomp on his toes and raised her sightless face to his. “Turnip?”
“The very one.”
Her reaction wasn’t at all what he expected. Instead of pulling away, she sagged against him, body to body, resting her full weight against him and pressing her cheek into his collarbone. “Thank goodness.”
“I’m glad to see you, too,” he said, but he couldn’t quite keep the worry from his voice. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
Turnip reached for the knots on the back of the hood, but they had been pulled so hard that they might as well have been set in mortar. He gave up and gently tugged the hood up over her head. It had snagged on her hairpins, which seemed to have riveted it into place.
As he worked on freeing her from the hood, Arabella shook her head, burrowing deeper into his cravat.
“He kept asking me where it is,” she said incoherently. “But I don’t know. I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
Turnip managed to get the hood off, taking most of her hairpins along with it.
“He?” He stroked back her disordered hair. It had come down the last time, too, when she had been knocked down by Signor Marconi. He remembered the tangled mass of it, the way it had felt beneath his fingers as he kissed her.
“The man who grabbed me. He pulled me back behind a hedge. I kicked him and ran.” She swallowed hard, obviously reliving it in her thoughts. “I thought you were he.”
Turnip’s hand stilled as all thoughts of dalliance fled, replaced by other, darker concerns. This was more than just a prank. “Someone grabbed you?”
Arabella jerked her head back, looking at him with wide, frightened eyes. “Turnip, he had a knife. A real knife this time.”
“Good Gad.” Turnip pressed her head back against his shoulder, holding on to her as tightly as he could. Forget thrashing; he was going to kill Frobisher and his lot when he saw them. “It’s all right. He’s gone now. It’s just me. No one else here.”
He leaned his cheek against her tangled hair, breathing in the familiar scent of her, feeling her breathing return to normal, her chest rising and falling against his, when something peculiar about what she had said belatedly struck him.
Turnip leaned his torso back, peering down his nose at a small slice of forehead and a large amount of hair. Her hair brushed his chin. “What do you mean ‘this time’?” he demanded.
There was silence from the direction of his cravat.