The Taming of Ryder Cavanaugh (The Cynster Sisters Duo 2)

“The Dower House.” Instantly, Ryder focused on the boy. “Who was in residence—who was there? Do you know?”

The boy shook his head. “Don’t know who. Didn’t see anyone but Cook and her two girls, but I can tell you what was ordered?”

When Ryder nodded encouragingly, the boy rattled off a list of fishes. Ryder had no way of interpreting the significance; he looked to Mrs. Pritchard for translation.

Her expression severe, his housekeeper obliged. “The turbot, my lord, wouldn’t be for the staff, nor yet the sturgeon.”

“I’ll say!” Davy Dixon snorted. “Top of the slate, they are.”

For an instant, Ryder’s mind reeled with the wild possibility whipping through it, but then he shook aside the fanciful notion and refocused on Davy Dixon. “Thank you. Mrs. Pritchard, I’m sure we should reward such a useful report.”

Mrs. Pritchard nodded. “Come along, Davy. There’s some cake and a shilling with your name on it in the kitchen.”

Steering the boy out, Mrs. Pritchard closed the door. Ryder stood staring at the panels for several moments, then he glanced at the maps, then at the deepening dusk outside, debated for a second longer, then headed for the door and the stairs.

Mrs. Pritchard was waiting in the front hall when he came quickly down, having thrown on his riding clothes and hauled on his boots. “You’re riding over there?”

Pulling on his gloves, he nodded. “At the very least, I should ask if anyone there has seen anything of her ladyship. If they haven’t . . . when Forsythe returns, tell him to take over organizing the searchers, and that I’ll work my way through the Dower House woods. We haven’t sent anyone over that way yet, and if I’m there anyway, I might as well check.”

Mrs. Pritchard grimaced. “I would say you should stay here and let someone else go, but there’s no one left but myself and Cook.”

“No point.” Ryder turned to the corridor that was the fastest way to the stables. “If my stepmother’s in residence, as it seems she is, I’m the only one here to whom she’ll consent to grant an audience.”

Mrs. Pritchard humphed and watched him go. He felt the concern in her gaze as he headed down the corridor, striding increasingly swiftly as, despite all rational arguments, premonition took hold.

Chapter Fifteen

“Lavinia wouldn’t have dared.” He muttered the words as he rode into the band of woodland that formed the eastern border of the home farm fields. There were no lanes through the woods, only the bridle path along which he was riding.

The trees there grew thickly, old stands of oak and beech shading the path and shrouding the woods in deep shadow.

The Dower House was as old as the original part of the abbey and had been one of the original ecclesiastical buildings attached to the holy house. His paternal grandmother had been living at the Dower House when he’d been born, but she’d died soon after, and subsequently the house had been lived in only by caretakers, until he’d effectively banished Lavinia there.

As none of the locals wished to work in her household, she’d been forced to seek staff from further afield. Consequently, unlike what generally occurred in the country, especially in a well-populated county like Wiltshire, the household at the Dower House had little contact and less connection with the staffs of the surrounding houses. More, although Lavinia insisted on living in the country for a decent part of the year, even while she’d reigned at the abbey, she had never put herself out to court the local gentry, had largely shunned them and their entertainments as beneath her, so she now had little truck with their neighbors.

Which meant the household at the Dower House was isolated, and something of an unknown world.

Ryder rode steadily on, Julius’s hoofbeats an echo of his own heartbeat.

His reaction to Mary’s disappearance had hardened with each passing hour. Each minute she was not by his side, within his protection, where she was supposed to be, strengthened his instinctive reaction. And increased his suspicion that she’d been abducted; nothing else could explain her continued absence. The unknown enemy who had first tried to kill him, then had shifted their sights to her, had taken her.

Whoever it was, they would pay.

Sometime over the past hours, the instincts he normally kept well leashed had come to the fore and now largely ruled him. When it came to Mary, to anyone threatening any danger, much less harm, to her, he wasn’t inclined to be anywhere near civilized.

Instinct and intellect were now wholly focused on one goal: On getting her back, safe within his keeping.

The thought that Lavinia might be the one responsible for Mary’s disappearance and all the rest . . . until now he’d dismissed the notion out of hand. Lavinia was a personal irritant, vindictive, vituperative, but essentially ineffectual; he hadn’t believed it at all likely that she would actually act in any concerted way. She never had. Ranting was one thing, making plans and setting them in train quite another.

Lavinia had always been a ranter, not a doer.

If she’d acted, then something had changed.

And as if signaling such a change . . . until now, whenever she’d taken up residence at the Dower House, she had sent a haughty note to the abbey, informing those on the estate that she was in the neighborhood. Often the carriages of her London friends would bowl up the abbey drive and have to be redirected out and around to the separate entrance to the Dower House drive.

This time Lavinia hadn’t sent a note.

Some might say that was because his marriage had put her nose even further out of joint, yet he would have thought she would have wanted Mary, and him, too, to know she was there, also a marchioness, and therefore a competitor in the neighborhood status stakes. That sounded more like the Lavinia he knew.