The Handmaiden's Necklace by Kat Martin Read Free Book Online Page B

would live, but the man would never walk again.
    Rafe felt no remorse. Oliver Randall had cruelly and deliberately destroyed two people’s lives for no other reason than jealousy. He had plotted and planned, lied and duped the entire town of London and especially Rafael. Now, in return, Oliver’s own life had been destroyed.
    “You reap what you sow,” Rafe’s father had said whenRafe was a boy. The late duke had been fair and just. He would have seen justice in the outcome of the duel.
    Still, Oliver wasn’t the only man at fault. In the days since the duel, Rafe had set out to mend some of the damage he, himself, had caused. He meant to clear Danielle’s name of any wrongdoing in the scandal that had ended their betrothal, but he wanted to speak to Dani first.
    In that regard, his efforts had failed.
    Rafe swore softly. Frustrated and out of sorts, he was thinking of Danielle when a knock at the door drew his attention. His butler, Jonathan Wooster, silver-haired with a narrow face and watery blue eyes, stood in the doorway.
    “I’m sorry to bother you, Your Grace, but Lord and Lady Belford are here to see you.”
    He had wondered when his friends would arrive. “Show them in.” They were worried about him, he knew. He’d been holed up since the duel and hadn’t left the house. Though justice had been served, he felt defeated. He hadn’t left the house because he couldn’t find the will.
    Ethan ushered Grace into the room, a lovely young woman with heavy auburn hair and jewel-green eyes and dressed in a fashionable, high-waisted gown a paler shade of green. Grace and Rafe had long been friends, but never anything more. Rafe believed that Grace had been destined from the start to become Ethan’s bride, the one person who could dispel the darkness his friend had carried inside him.
    “How are you feeling?” Ethan asked, a worried look on his face. He was as tall as Rafe, leaner, darker, his features more sculpted, the sort of man women were drawn to. Even more so now that his demons were gone.
    “The wound was never that serious.” Rafe strode towardthem across the room. “And the arm seems to be healing very well.”
    “That’s very good news.” Grace’s pretty face lit with a smile. “Perhaps you feel well enough to accompany us to luncheon. It’s such a lovely day.”
    Rafe glanced away. His body was mending, but his mind lingered in the past. The day after the duel, he had summoned Jonas McPhee to discover the whereabouts of Lady Wycombe and her niece, Danielle Duval. Since Rafe hadn’t seen her since the afternoon tea and neither had his mother, he thought that perhaps she and her aunt had returned to Wycombe Park.
    Instead, according to McPhee, Danielle and her aunt had left the country.
    “I can tell by the grim look on your face that you have discovered Danielle is gone,” Ethan said.
    Rafe frowned. “How did you know?”
    “Victoria told us,” Grace said. “She seems to have an invisible connection to every servant in the city. She was looking for information about Danielle. I suppose she thought you would probably wish to see her.”
    Rafe bit back a sigh of frustration. “Unfortunately, Jonas McPhee informed me three days ago that Danielle and her aunt have sailed for America, gone off to the city of Philadelphia. I had hoped to speak to her, to apologize and somehow try to make amends. I don’t suppose that is going to happen now.”
    “Certainly not right away,” Ethan agreed.
    Rafe looked at his friend. “Did Victoria also tell you that Danielle has accepted a proposal of marriage from an American name Richard Clemens?”
    “No. I don’t think she knew.”
    Rafe stared past the couple, out the window into the garden. The sun was shining as it hadn’t in days, and a pair of sparrows sat on the branch of a sycamore tree beside the house.
    He turned back to his friends. “Danielle has given up her home, been forced to leave her own country to try to find some kind of