But when she realized that more than three hours had gone by since the last time she'd seen him, she started getting a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach.
She began to search the house, but none of the servants had seen him. Neither had Helen or Claire. In fact, the only person who seemed to have any idea of his whereabouts was Judith.
"I saw him out the window," the little girl said.
"You did?" Ellie asked, practically sagging with relief. "Where was he going?"
"To the stables. He was limping."
"Oh, thank you, Judith," Ellie said, giving her a quick hug. She dashed out of the room and down the stairs. Charles had probably just gone to the stables to try to figure out who had tampered with his saddle. She wished he'd left her a note, but she was so relieved to know where he was that she felt no anger at his oversight.
When she reached her destination, however, there was no sign of her husband. Leavey was supervising several stablehands who were mucking out the stalls, but none of them seemed to know the earl's whereabouts.
"Are you certain you haven't seen him?" Ellie asked for the third time. "Miss Judith insisted she saw him enter the stables."
"It must have been when we were exercising the horses," Leavey replied.
"When was that?"
"Several hours ago."
Ellie sighed impatiently. Where was Charles? And then her eye caught upon something strange. Something red.
"What's this?" she whispered, kneeling down. She picked up a small handful of straw.
"What is it, my lady?" Leavey asked.
"It's blood," she said, her voice shaking. "On the straw."
"Are you certain?"
She smelled it and nodded. "Oh, dear Lord." She looked back up at Leavey, her face going white in an instant. "They've taken him. Dear Lord, someone's taken him."
* * *
Charles's first thought upon regaining consciousness was that he was never going to drink again. He'd been hungover before, but never had he felt this brand of skull-pounding agony. Then it occurred to him that it was the middle of the day, and he hadn't been drinking and—
He groaned as splinters of memory shot through his mind. Someone had bashed him over the head with a rifle.
He opened his eyes and looked around. He appeared to be in the bedroom of an abandoned cottage. The furnishings were old and dusty, and the air smelled of mildew. His hands and feet were tied, which didn't surprise him.
Frankly, what did surprise him was that he wasn't dead. Obviously someone wanted to kill him. What was the point of kidnapping him first? Unless, of course, his enemy had decided he wanted Charles to know his identity before delivering the final blow.
But in doing so, the would-be killer had granted Charles a little more time to plot and plan, and he vowed to escape and bring his enemy to justice. He wasn't sure how he would do it, bound as he was and with a sprained ankle to boot, but he'd be damned if he'd depart this world mere weeks after discovering true love.
The first order of business was clearly to do something about the ropes binding his hands, so he scooted across the floor to a broken chair sitting in the corner. The splintered wood looked sharp, and he started rubbing the rope against the jagged edge. It was clearly going to take a long time to break through the heavy rope, but his heart lifted with each tiny fiber that snapped under the friction.
After about five minutes of rubbing, Charles heard a door slam in the outer room of the cottage, and he quickly brought his hands back to his side. He started to move back to the center of the room, where he'd been dumped unconscious, but then decided to stay put. He could make it look like he had moved across the room simply to lean up against the wall.
Voices drifted through the air, but Charles couldn't make out what his captors were saying. He caught a snatch of a cockney twang, and deduced that he was dealing with hired thugs. It just didn't make sense that his enemy would be from London's underworld.
After a minute or two, it became apparent that his captors had no intention of checking up on him. Charles decided that they must be waiting for whomever was in charge, and he went back to work fraying the rope.
How long he sat there, moving his wrists back and forth across the jagged wood, he didn't know, but he was barely a third of the way through the rope when he heard the outer door slam again, this time followed by a distinctly upper-class voice.
Charles yanked his hands back to his body and pushed the broken chair away from him with his shoulder. If he guessed right, his enemy would want to see him right away, and—
The door opened. Charles held his breath. A silhouette filled the doorway.
"Good day, Charles."
"Cecil?"
"The very one."
Cecil? His mealy-mouthed cousin, the one who had always tattled when they were children, the one who had always taken an inordinate amount of pleasure in stepping on bugs?
"You're a hard man to kill," Cecil said. "I finally realized I was going to have to do it myself."
Charles supposed he should have paid more attention to his cousin's fixation with dead bugs. "What the hell do you think you're doing, Cecil?" he demanded.
"Ensuring my place as the next Earl of Billington."
Charles just stared at him. "But you're not even next in line to inherit. If you kill me, the title goes to Phillip."
"Phillip is dead."
Charles felt sick. He'd never liked Phillip, but he'd never wished him ill. "What did you do to him?" he asked hoarsely.
"Me? I did nothing. Our dear cousin's gambling debts did him in. I believe one of his moneylenders finally ran out of patience. He was fished out of the Thames just yesterday."