After the Abduction by Sabrina Jeffries Read Free Book Online

casually as if this were a fashionable London salon. But Sebastian wasn’t fooled by his nonchalant air.
    “I thought you had matters under control,” his uncle finally drawled. “You claimed they wouldn’t come looking for you.”
    Wincing to hear his own half truths echoed back to him, Sebastian rasped away half the penciled design before realizing it. What else could he have told his uncle? He hadn’t wanted to worry him. Not with so many other matters to worry him when he’d first returned from Sussex. Like how to find Morgan.
    “You said even if they came after you,” his uncle went on, “you could handle it.”
    “I can.” Sebastian worked the rasp with a vengeance, and sawdust puddled on his knee. “I will.”
    “As you handled Crouch? By agreeing to his terms even though it meant kidnapping an innocent?”
    “I executed that kidnapping perfectly without hurting her, and then got her out of it unharmed.” His uncle raised an eyebrow, and he growled, “I’d like to see you do better.”

    “Oh, I’m not insane enough to take on a band of smugglers single-handedly.” His uncle flicked a particle of snuff off his coat sleeve. “Or arrogant enough to carry a woman into danger with the assumption that I can save her in the end.”
    “Deuce take it, Uncle!” He tossed down the rasp. “What do you want from me?”
    His uncle’s cool gaze pinned him. “I want you to admit you don’t have everything under control for a change. That you occasionally blunder.”
    The fact that Uncle Lew was right didn’t make it any easier to accept. “I didn’t blunder. I did what I had to—found out what Crouch’s men had done with Morgan.”
    “For all the good it did.” Uncle Lew pocketed his snuffbox. “If the Navy Board hadn’t told us two months ago that he’d been spotted on a pirate ship, we’d still be thinking he’d gone down on the Oceana. ”
    Sebastian sighed heavily, then dusted sawdust off his trousers. That was the hardest to stomach—that the kidnapping, the final confrontation with Crouch, all had been for naught. “You’re welcome to go home whenever you wish, Uncle Lew,” Sebastian grumbled.
    “Oho, my boy, you will not shake me off that easily, though I daresay you’d like me to trot across the park to Foxglen, so you can throw our guests out on their ears before they start punching giant holes in your paper-thin fabrication.”
    “ Our guests?” With a snort of disgust, Sebastian tossed down the stock. He’d ruined it, anyway. “You invited them, not I.”
    His uncle waved his hand dismissively. “A minor detail. How else could I react, after hearing how you destroyed that poor girl’s life?”
    “I was trying to protect her, blast it! I told you—Crouch didn’t just want ransom money; he wanted revenge on Knighton for some business dealings gone sour.That’s why I agreed to Crouch’s terms. He would have had her kidnapped, with or without me.” He shuddered. “And raping Knighton’s sister-in-law would have made a fine revenge.”
    “At least you protected her from that.”
    “I protected her from everything. ”
    “Then why are she and her family after your blood?”
    The lash of his uncle’s words raised welts on his conscience, exactly as the man had intended. He ignored them. And the image of Juliet’s accusing eyes. Devil take it, he’d done his best under difficult circumstances. He refused to feel guilty about it. “Perhaps they don’t view matters as I do.”
    “Can you blame them? When you didn’t bother to tell them any of this? You simply restored her to her relations and vanished, instead of remaining to accept whatever penance they required.”
    “A trial? That’s what Knighton would have required, I assure you.”
    “Not if you’d offered to marry her and make it right.”
    He scrubbed a hand wearily over his face. “Don’t think I didn’t consider it.” Especially after that kiss. “But it was too risky. If they’d dragged me off