Daring by Jillian Hunter Page A

hate that name,” she whispered with a frown. “It’s even worse than Marguerite.”
    “You shouldn’t talk, lass.” He looked as if he were waging a fierce war within himself to contain his anger. “Just let me help you.”
    “I’m not really a recluse either,” Maggie confessed.
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    “No. I suppose it doesn’t, does it?”
    “Ask her what the men looked like,” Norah prompted over his shoulder.
    Connor hesitated, struggling to control his emotions, to recover from the shock of realizing that not only was Sheena missing but that this was the girl who had enchanted him such a short time ago. He couldn’t think straight. His mind was reeling. His body still pulsed with outrage and the sick fear of riding across Edinburgh after the mysterious carriage that had disappeared into the night.
    He hadn’t found his sister. Was she already dead? He wanted to throw back his head and roar like an animal in frustration.
    He wanted to take action, to make everything as it was before. Sheena was the baby, the wild child of the family. She wouldn't know how to defend herself. He couldn’t bear to think of anyone harming her, or of never seeing her again.
    Guilt tore through him as he remembered wishing her out of his life only an hour ago.
    What if she were wandering about hurt and frightened, abandoned in a dirty alley? Would someone help her?
    Someone had tried.
    He stared down in wonder at the girl lying so still before him. Her bones felt fragile beneath his fingers, like finely wrought porcelain. Her skin reminded him of moonlight, fair and translucent, without a trace of warmth. He frowned, pressing his thumb against her lower lip as if to still the sigh that fluttered out. She had been so vibrant earlier.
    “Why?” he wondered aloud.
    Why had this happened? He could understand someone attacking him, but not Sheena. And this girl who’d made him laugh and feel like a fool—had he finally found someone he could give his heart to only to lose her in a twisted stroke of fortune? For an irrational moment he almost believed the rumors of his reputation. Had he sold his soul somewhere along the way? Did tonight, his celebration of triumph, mark the beginning of the price he would have to pay?
    He set his jaw, refusing to let the irrational thoughts take root. He concentrated instead on the anger burning in his blood, a potent emotion he would use to punish the men who had done this. It made him want to kill with his bare hands to see her lying here like a broken doll, and to imagine Sheena in even worse circumstances. He could only blame himself. Because he dealt in danger, two innocent women could lose their lives.
    “Do you remember, lass?” he asked, not pressuring her, brushing back the black curls that lay against her cool ashen cheek.
    She frowned as she fought to bring back the details. “It was a large black carriage,” she said slowly. “The driver had gray-brown hair, I think. But I didn’t see the man who took your sister. He had on a mask, and—”
    She stopped in mid-sentence, biting the inside of her lip. Everything was so confused in her mind, superimposed with the memory of her parents’ arrest, the police who had stood like sentinels of death on the chateau lawn. Then that curious blankness, the gap in recall, images suppressed like tender shoots in black soil, pressing against layers of protective consciousness.
    “I can’t remember much more than that, but I won’t lie to you anymore, my lord,” she whispered fiercely. “I’m not really a criminal—we had to get the confession. Jamie Munro is a dimwit but he’s no killer, no matter what the papers say. Please don’t prosecute him. Whoever murdered those people is still running free.”
    Connor’s hand went deathly still on her cheek.
    “The poor lassie is delirious.” Jacob, the old groom, shook his grizzled head in sympathy. “ ’Tis from the shock and the blow to her head, no doubt. I’ve seen it happen