Page 40 of Inconvenient Honor
“I will take you to my aunt. You will tell her everything. What happens after that is up to the Valide Sultan.”
“Time, favored uncle. I don’t have time to wait.”
A slow smile spread across Sahin Pasha’s face, reached his eyes, and warmed. “God is with you, little one. We have packed up our delegation. We leave in two days.”
“Two days?” she gasped.
“If you wish our help, you must take it now. If you choose not to, I will consider our debt filled.”
“Very well, favored uncle. I will come with you in two days.”
“Your father?”
“I’ll leave word for him and pray he reaches London to get it.”
“He may follow you, as is his right. I won’t hide you.”
“I wouldn’t want you to.”
“And your marquess? Will he pursue you?” The shrewd old man held her eyes.
“He is unlikely to expend effort for a troublesome woman.”And he isn’t my marquess.“Besides, I believe he is about to become betrothed.”
“I see,” Sahin said sadly. “I regret—but no matter. It is good he will not pursue.”
Stepping out the back of Sahin’s London townhouse, swathed in her scarf, Lily hoped he was correct. A dark-skinned servant slipped silently out behind her. She wanted to protest but knew it to be futile. Sahin, in his way, could be as stubborn about her need for protection as the marquess.
As to his lordship, a niggling doubt about his willingness to pursue her would not stop teasing at her mind. Glenaire might not care about her personally, but he did hate to have his will thwarted. She pitied Roger Heaton.
Chapter Fifteen
“Any half-pay corporal, any semi-intelligent boot boy could have stayed with one small woman. A sickly schoolgirl might have done a better job. A—” The list of those who performed better than Heaton had gone on for some time, and still Richard’s anger boiled over.
Why can’t the damned woman do what she’s told? That Thornton woman has cut up my peace since?—
“Find her, Heaton. Find her before the sun goes down.”
“Yes, sir, we have men?—”
“Yes, yes, you have squads of our men looking. Not good enough! Don’t try, man. Succeed. Find her!”
Heaton left too beaten down to register relief.
Where the hell are you, Lily? That snake Volkov is loose and— What if she went to meet him? To beg for her father?
Richard felt ill. He did not like the feeling. He grit his teeth and sat down. The naval reports on the waters around Naples and Sicily lay on his desk.
I have too much work to worry about one foolish woman determined to put herself at risk.
He sorted the papers into stacks: one for naval reports; one for dispatches from his agents on the Italian peninsula in Malta and on Sicily; one for those actually inside the Kingdom of Naples. Yet another, dark with age, came from the ambassador in Washington. It quoted verbatim Stephen Decatur’s reports on his destruction of theBarbary fleet off Algiers and the concessions he wrenched from Algiers and Tunis.
Lily would find this interesting,he thought. He dropped his head back and stared at the ceiling.Lily Thornton, with her fine mind, ought to know better than anyone how dangerous Volkov could be. Why can’t she think sensibly?
He reread Viscount Exmouth’s report on the bombardment of Algiers and the concessions England extracted in 1816. He pulled the current analysis from Maitland, England’s governor general on Malta, to the front and read it through. The man sent one brief page to tell the Foreign Office no danger existed, patent nonsense. The corsairs scaled back their raids but never ended them entirely. Richard flipped it over twice as if he could find better intelligence. The words swam together, and Lily’s face, pale and frightened as he saw it the night he found her with Volkov, came into focus.
She knows, and takes risks anyway. What is driving the fool woman?
He pushed Maitland’s assertions aside and began to read dispatches from Naples, listing each known fact on one list and speculation on another. It would take him hours to go through the mountain of reports in detail. Perhaps then he would have some idea what to suggest to Castlereagh.
