The Taming of Ryder Cavanaugh (Cynster #20) - Stephanie Laurens Page 0,132
his own heartbeat.
His reaction to Mary’s disappearance had hardened with each passing hour. Each minute she was not by his side, within his protection, where she was supposed to be, strengthened his instinctive reaction. And increased his suspicion that she’d been abducted; nothing else could explain her continued absence. The unknown enemy who had first tried to kill him, then had shifted their sights to her, had taken her.
Whoever it was, they would pay.
Sometime over the past hours, the instincts he normally kept well leashed had come to the fore and now largely ruled him. When it came to Mary, to anyone threatening any danger, much less harm, to her, he wasn’t inclined to be anywhere near civilized.
Instinct and intellect were now wholly focused on one goal: On getting her back, safe within his keeping.
The thought that Lavinia might be the one responsible for Mary’s disappearance and all the rest . . . until now he’d dismissed the notion out of hand. Lavinia was a personal irritant, vindictive, vituperative, but essentially ineffectual; he hadn’t believed it at all likely that she would actually act in any concerted way. She never had. Ranting was one thing, making plans and setting them in train quite another.
Lavinia had always been a ranter, not a doer.
If she’d acted, then something had changed.
And as if signaling such a change . . . until now, whenever she’d taken up residence at the Dower House, she had sent a haughty note to the abbey, informing those on the estate that she was in the neighborhood. Often the carriages of her London friends would bowl up the abbey drive and have to be redirected out and around to the separate entrance to the Dower House drive.
This time Lavinia hadn’t sent a note.
Some might say that was because his marriage had put her nose even further out of joint, yet he would have thought she would have wanted Mary, and him, too, to know she was there, also a marchioness, and therefore a competitor in the neighborhood status stakes. That sounded more like the Lavinia he knew.
There was no competition—not between his wife and his self-absorbed stepmother—but Lavinia wouldn’t see it like that, which begged the question of why she hadn’t sent a note.
Mrs. Pritchard knew of the antipathy between him and Lavinia, as, indeed, did most of his staff. None of them had fared well under, much less liked, Lavinia, which was why they all viewed him as a savior of sorts.
So on learning that Lavinia had taken up residence at the Dower House, but this time secretly, Mrs. Pritchard had been quick to leap to the conclusion he was still resisting.
He simply couldn’t imagine Lavinia actively—and nearly successfully—arranging his murder. Of plotting and planning to have Mary abducted.
Glimpsing the steep roofs of the Dower House through the trees, he slowed Julius to a trot, then a walk. No need to advertise his arrival, not until he’d had a look around.
The bridle path joined the gravel drive fifty yards from the forecourt before the front porch. The Dower House had little by way of gardens, the woods crowding close on three sides. It was a very quiet, private place.
Registering that quietness, indeed, the pervasive silence, he reined to a halt just inside the path, within the shadows of overarching branches, and studied the house.
It appeared . . . not uninhabited but temporarily deserted, as if everyone had gone out for the day.
Leaving the front door ajar.
The sight filled him with cold dread.
All the thoughts he’d been avoiding consciously thinking spilled through his mind. Lavinia had the wherewithal to hire thugs to kill him—and to hire men to hire them, and so forth. She knew which routes he used when walking home in town. Here, in the country, despite the lack of friendship between the staffs at the abbey and the Dower House, Lavinia’s stableman or grooms would know where the abbey tack room was, would have been able to identify which saddle was Mary’s, the only newish sidesaddle there, and could easily have watched from the woods and seen him assessing her driving the gig and guessed which road they would take to Axford . . .
The scorpion he couldn’t immediately explain, but as for the adder, Lavinia’s staff would have known when the abbey staff would be gathered on the front steps greeting Mary, and would have known which bedroom would be hers, and how to reach it quickly and leave again via the servants’ stairs.