"She also gave me an accounting of her education costs, which she now considers a reimbursable expense." Smythe handed Ryan yet another folder of papers. "And miscellaneous fees"-another folder was added to the pair in his hands-"that include various bribes, transportation costs, and professional books. She told me not everything could be recovered, but that was the price of stupidity."

Ryan dropped the folders on the table, wondering what the hell that was supposed to mean. "Anything else?"

"I paid her, sir," his loyal solicitor said.

"Everything?"

"You told me to cooperate. And she presented her case well."

Leave it to Rachel to outtrump the trumpeter and abscond with more money than the Irish division of D&B was probably even worth. Admittedly, he was impressed with her little mercenary heart-which gave way to a greater worry that begged to ask the question why she didn't take the offer. There would only be one reason for that. She was going to make a bid for control-and with his own bloody money.

"Impossible," he said. "Bloody impossible circumstances."

He had gone to Rathdrum last week with the intent of taking Rachel out of the playing field and had managed to lose the first battle as easily as Smythe had lost his.

Ryan flicked open the lock on his satchel to add Rachel's folders. His satchel smelled like her, and he resisted bringing it to his face. He peered at the cloudy sky outside from beneath the low brim of his hat. Her complete disregard for her future overwhelmed any diplomatic inclination he felt to settle the political issues between them. He now accepted that this buyout would come at a price. Perhaps as penance for two decades of idiocy when it came to his utter frustration to make some logical peace between the paradox of his emotions when it came to her.

She should have taken his offer for her shares in the company when she'd had the chance.

And he should never have slept with her.

Yet, for one night in Glenealy, when Ryan had looked at the woman he'd once loved with his entire soul, he'd wondered what his future might have held if she'd fought half as hard for him as she'd ever fought for Donally & Bailey.

Ryan only knew he would not be losing any more battles.

Little did Rachel truly comprehend her circumstances-or her advantage if she figured out the truth. In the meantime, he had wired his solicitors in London to research handfasting laws and attempt to untangle the knot David had tied around his life.

"Finish your work here in Dublin." Carrying his coat over his arm, Ryan walked to the door, his hard-soled shoes marking his steps on the planked floor. "These quarters will be paid for until the end of the week."

Smythe glanced at the chambers. "Are you sure?"

"Try not to think of this as a vacation," Ryan said.

The weather couldn't have been more portentous of her future, Rachel thought as she sat on the Holyhead-bound packet, grateful that she'd made the ferry. Surrounded for the last few hours by her work, she raised her gaze from the table where she sat jotting down notes. The ferry was huge, with its double-decker tiers and windows on all sides. She estimated three hundred people on board. Once she was in Wales, the train would take her to London. She felt clever to have purchased the last two tickets out of Dublin for the day.

Attempting to return her focus to her work, she looked around the crowded salon before wisely capping the ink bottle lest it spill. Wind buffeted the ship, seeping through the glass behind Rachel, and she drew her cloak higher onto her shoulders.

Only the truly hardy people remained topside on deck as the storm proceeded to get worse. Whitecaps dotted the iron gray sea that blended into the horizon.

"It be colder than a wart on a bugger's ass." Elsie slid into the empty seat across from Rachel, bringing with her a chill breeze. Wrapped in a warm woolen cloak, she shivered. "Pardon, mum. I am colder than a wart-"

"You're soaked." Rachel leaned across the table to test Elsie's sleeve. "Where are your gloves?"

Elsie pulled a pair of woolen mittens from her pockets. "Wet, mum. It started to rain."

"Didn't you think you should have come inside earlier?" She reached for her reticule and withdrew her fur-lined gloves. "I'll not have you catch your death. Put these on until you warm."

"But what about you? Memaw told me I was to take care of you. If you were to come down with a chill..."

"I won't. Besides, we'll be in Holyhead in another hour."

"Will Memaw be all right without us, mum?" Elsie asked after a few moments. "Father David will check up on her, will he not?"

"God forbid," Rachel said under her breath.

She was in the process of returning to her notes when across the salon, the door flew open and the very flesh-and-muscle image of her thoughts blew in out of the cold. Frigid gusts whipped at his heavy coat as he turned to shut the door, his height setting him off from the crush of people surrounding him.

Almost as swiftly, Rachel dropped her astonished gaze to her papers. What was Ryan doing on the ferry?

"Move to your left, Elsie," Rachel whispered, pulling her hood over her head. "I fear the people milling about are distracting me from my work."

"Yes, mum."

All of her senses heightened, Rachel leaned to the right of Elsie's shifting body to better glimpse Ryan walking across the stateroom toward a bench that faced the picture window. Somewhere in her whirling thoughts, the realization that she could not be more cursed traipsed across her mind.

Rachel dropped her gaze to her papers. She hadn't expected that Ryan might still be in Ireland. Then he' d probably spoken to his solicitor. He would know what she was planning to do with all of his money.

She reread the letter she'd been composing to Johnny, frustrated when she'd discovered she'd lost the thread of her thoughts. Frustrated that in spite of the precautions with which she'd sought to fortify herself for the long road ahead, she had not been prepared for her reaction to Ryan. She couldn't believe that he was on board. That he had been on board for the last two hours without her knowing. He must have been sitting on the upper deck the entire time.

Rachel peered around Elsie. His back to her, his arms stretched across the back of the bench, Ryan had discarded his satchel and valise next to him on the bench. In front of him, rain rivulets trailed down the grimy window and obscured most of his view.

With unapproachable invisibly stamped across every hardened inch of him, his vulnerability was oddly striking in contrast. He appeared like some carved granite tour de force as Rachel wondered what he was thinking, staring out at the cold empty sea.

No longer wondering at the beating of her heart, she looked away. She knew that she wanted him enough not to pretend that she didn't, which only made her quest to defeat him harder.

But not impossible.

An hour later, the ferry arrived at Holyhead. Rachel disembarked in the crowd behind Ryan, never losing sight of him as he hailed a hansom to take him to the railway terminal. She stood a dozen people behind him at the telegraph office in the station. Not once did he turn.

Not once did he look over the crowd or seem to care that he drew attention wherever he went. He was beautiful and could make something as mundane as reading last evening's broadsheet tantalizing to watch. She saw him again just after dawn as the train pulled into a depot an hour outside London. He'd been sitting in the first-class coach, two cars down from where she and Elsie had encamped for the night. She' d opened her eyes realizing the train had stopped when the conductor walked down the long aisle outside her compartment announcing the station.

Ryan stood on the ramp nearly in front of her window, a shadow marring his jaw, his valise in one hand as he settled his hat on his head, looking as if he hadn't slept. Yielding to an immature sense of justice, she felt her mouth tilt, when suddenly he turned his head and looked directly at her in the window.

Startling her out of her sleepy complacency.

As if he'd known exactly where she'd been sitting on the train.She felt the kick of her pulse. The telltale heat in her veins. She'd glimpsed the same intensity in his eyeswhen he'd made love to her, when his warm skin pressed against hers, and she'd kissed him with anurgency she had not been able to control.

"Where will you be staying?" The glass muffled his words.

A furtive glance at the other occupants around her reassured Rachel no one was paying attention. "Go away." She mouthed the words.

He put his hand to his ear.

"Go away." She mouthed the words more forcefully.

Without taking his eyes off hers, he moved to the window, his arrogance hardly surprising, considering he

probably knew she was in London to put a halt to his precious Ore Industries raid on D&B.

She lowered the window and leaned outside. "You're the last person I would tell where I'm going, Ryan Donally." She attempted to keep her voice low.

For a moment, he merely studied her in exasperation. "You are the most stubborn, infuriating woman I

have ever known in my entire life, Rachel."

"And you are the most infuriating, stubborn man."

"You have no idea what you're doing."

"I intend to talk to Johnny."

She knew exactly what she was doing and hoped Mr. Williams had the list of major stockholders in the

company ready for her. She would fight him.

Ryan took a step nearer. He smelled salty and hot. Of sunshine and coffee.

"Go back to Ireland, Rachel. I meant what I said earlier."

Nearly eye level with him, she refused retreat. Faint embers of heat, remnants of Glenealy, burned

between them. She knew he felt it, too. "Why did you wait so long to shut me down?" Her voice quieter

now, she challenged him to answer. "You've had ample opportunity in the past."The train gears released, shooting a plume of steam onto the platform. "Why don't you tell me yourtheory? Seeing that you've thought this completely out to the bloody end."

"Instinct," she said succinctly, feeling safer than she should with the glass between them. "Deep inside,

you don't really want to destroy me...any more than you do D&B."

With a crank of screeching metal, the heavy wheels began to move. "Is that right?" Noting the flush on her pale skin, his amused gaze lifted to her lips and again to her eyes. "This is no game, Rachel." He walked beside the window, but the train began to pick up speed. "And there are no rules."

"Trust me. I never liked rules." He was making the worst mistake of his life, and she wouldn't let him do it.

Blowing him a kiss, Rachel slammed the window shut. She saw his mouth move. Then with a purely masculine gesture that only Ryan would dare execute in full view of a hundred people, he gave her a brief magnanimous salute. Out of the station, sunlight poured through the grimy window. Ryan remained on the platform, a lone figure in black, and she shut the shades, forcing herself to breathe deeply.

Rachel had lived in a man's world long enough to recognize danger when it opened its teeth and threatened to eat her alive-and, not for the first time since disembarking from Ireland did she appreciate that Ryan made a formidable enemy.

"He looked royally sore, mum," Elsie said.

Ignoring the disapproving stares of the elderly couple sitting in the cabin, Rachel dusted off her traveling dress and pretended indifference. Now all she had to do was find a place to stay. For all of her independence, she had never lived alone-certainly not in a place like London.

Johnny wasn't in residence. She'd learned from Stewart that he'd gone to Scotland to inspect three D&B sites. Moira and the children had gone with him, as if they expected to be there a while. A coincidence that did not escape her. Rachel disliked the idea of asking anyone else in Ryan's family for help. But she'd once been close to his sister, Brianna. They'd kept in contact, so it wasn't completely unheard of that she should find herself on the Duchess of Ravenspur's doorstep that evening after a fruitless search for a place to stay.

Standing outside the Bank of London that morning, she'd not realized the task ahead. Johnny had procured the rooms at the Palace Hotel during her last stay. Alone and single, she'd been unable to find suitable quarters for herself and Elsie, and she refused to stay any night at all in a place where she'd need to brace a chair against the door.

A butler answered her knock, and, after introducing herself, she stepped into the entryway before he could send her on her way.

A long moment later, a tall man appeared in the foyer. He wore a snowy white shirt open at the neck and black trousers. He was carrying a sleeping infant, its dark downy head resting on his shoulder.

Rachel had never met a duke before. She had asked to see Brianna and had not expected her husband. "May I help you...Miss Bailey?" he asked, her card in his hand.

Her gaze went to the tiny child in his arms. "I see that I'm interrupting."

"I've just returned from the ministry. Late meeting," he said, then when she didn't reply added, "My wife took our oldest and four of his cousins to the menagerie exhibit. She is staying with her brother, Sir Christopher, tonight, and won't be back until tomorrow."

Now, what would she do? "She sounds busy."

"Fortunately, so was I."

"I see." His glib humor made her smile. He looked as if he could be fearsome when setting someone to task. Yet, as she met his gaze beneath the high chandelier in the foyer, she thought only that there was a sparkle of deviltry in his gray eyes.

"You're the woman Ryan went to see in Ireland," he said, with subtle interest.His obvious knowledge of Ryan's whereabouts this past week worried her. "And here I am, newly arrived in London, quite desperate to find someplace more civil to stay than what is currently offered. I swear I'm not penniless, and I do not intend to stay longer than it takes to find a house."

"Are you alone?"

"My maid is outside waiting in the hansom."

His gaze shifted to the man standing behind her. "See that the driver is paid and the girl brought inside,"

he told the butler before giving her his full attention. "You're exhausted, so I'll spare you the lecture onyour lack of common sense for not coming here earlier, Miss Bailey.""Thank you, Your Grace."She appreciated the reprieve, and was glad that she'd finally found a haven among friends.

Chapter 13.