Too Sinful to Deny by Erica Ridley Page A

the crew for much longer. And the only—the only —way one ceased to be a member of a band of treasonous smugglers was the precise way Timothy had found himself retired from duty. If Evan was about to undertake his last mission come Friday, he had to know. Now.
    “How did you know they’d gone?” he blurted unpiratically. Damn.
    Derogatory laughter sounded from behind him. “Who you think sold ’im an extra night with the ship, ye lubber? We wouldn’t be standing around this fool cave like ladies at a tea party if we wasn’t waiting on those jacks to get back with the damn—”
    A gunshot.
    A yelp of pain.
    It took a split second to realize that although it was Poseidon’s pistol that had fired, it had not been Evan’s cry. He risked a glance behind him. One of the water rats was doubled over, hand to his ample gut, blood seeping between his fingers.
    “Ye shot me!” he choked out, then crumpled to his knees.
    “If you’d shut yer carcass-hole now and again, I wouldn’t have to.” Poseidon gave the pistol handle an expert twirl but didn’t return it to his waistband. No doubt the barrel was scalding hot. “Now, as I were saying. I’m getting right tired of all this chitchat. Anything else got your bonnet in a twist this fine day, Bothwick? Because one way or another, you’re about to take your leave.”

    With a reasonably low number of wrong turns—and the discovery of yet another heretofore unseen staircase—Susan found herself shivering in the chill morning air beneath the arched entrance to the Beaunes’ rock garden. Or grave garden, as it were. The serpentine rose vines twining the gate seemed lifeless and frozen, like the grounds of a bewitched castle awaiting the arrival of a handsome prince. Except there would be no waking up from this nightmare.
    The dead would stay dead. (Well, perhaps. If she asked them nicely.)
    Susan tiptoed out from beneath the thorn-encrusted archway, hyper-aware of each impression her booted feet made upon the cold soil. She did not see Lady Beaune. She didn’t see a single soul. Perhaps that was for the better.
    Now that she was looking for such things, she found the three flat stones with relative ease. The first two marble rectangles were unmarked. She might not have recognized them for what they were, had the third—otherwise identical—stone not been engraved, Lord Jean-Louis Beaune, 1755–1813 .
    He’d died last year. Last year! Susan’s head swam with the implications. Not that there were overt implications.
    Whom did the other two graves belong to, that their rotting corpses merited neither name nor date? Had they died last year as well? Or longer ago? Or—Susan’s gaze jerked toward the skeletal manor looming over her shoulder—more recently yet? Did everyone who resided here meet an untimely death?
    That’s when she noticed the others. The (heaven help her!) dozens of freshly turned plots dotting the so-called garden. How could there be so many? And so recent? And so . . . small. Susan’s stomach convulsed in revulsion as she realized that such spaces were only big enough for children.
    She backed out of the garden in slow, uncoordinated motions, grappling behind her for a handhold and wincing when errant thorns drew blood from her fingertips.
    The clouds broke overhead. A dull glow whitewashed the dead earth, giving the entire vista a bleached, colorless appearance more appropriate to a dream than reality. The marble slabs glinted. The pungent scent of the dark soil mixed with the too-sweet stench of dying roses. Or something else. Something darker. There were no roses this time of year. The garden itself tilted, uneven, impossible. Susan fled back inside, desperate for the sanctuary of her bedchamber.
    But this time, all the stairs led down.
    Down, down into the bowels of Moonseed Manor, down into a cellar she hadn’t known existed. From those hellish depths came a plaintive whimper, like that of a lost cat . . . or a child, terrified of becoming