by Julia Ross
The earl sneered up at the rider. “Make me, sir!”
With the cadenced moves of a dancer, the mare sidestepped to pin the earl against the carriage door. The horseman pressed the pistol barrel against Lord Hanley’s temple.
“You don’t know quite how close you are to losing your brains, my lord. As soon as this mare backs a step, you will do as I say.”
The mare edged back. Shaking with rage, the earl kicked off his shoes. Mud squelched beneath his stocking feet.
The highwayman’s aim remained steady. “A good start, my lord! But pray don’t try anything foolish! My hand is beginning to shake at my own temerity. Any sudden, untoward moves and I’m afraid this pistol will fire. Your trousers, if you please.”
His eyes glued to his tormentor, Lord Hanley snapped open his buttons. At a gesture from the highwayman he raised his hands above his head once again, and Miracle tugged his trousers down over his feet.
“Perhaps you would oblige me by checking the pockets, ma’am? Then you may toss His Lordship’s shoes with his unmentionables over the hedge.”
Swallowing laughter, she did as he suggested. “There’s nothing else.”
“What, no more gold? No pocket pistol?”
“Nothing.”
The horseman tipped his head. Lord Hanley’s stockings were now soaked. “Perhaps your treasure is secreted in those nice linen drawers, my lord?”
“Devil take it, sir! Have you no decency?”
The highwayman laughed. “Not much! Though now that we’ve established that you have no hidden weapons, you may keep your undergarments. But only for the sake of the lady’s outraged modesty, you understand.”
One of the menservants sniggered, then bit his lip and stared off into space.
“You, sir!” The highwayman pointed one pistol at the servant. The man snapped to attention. “You will unhitch the horses and encourage them to leave.”
A few minutes later the harnessed team careened away up the road, leaving the carriage behind.
The horseman bowed from the saddle. “So sorry to discompose you, my lord.” He gathered his reins, as if about to ride away. “May I wish you and the lady a safe journey?”
Miracle stared at him with her heart in her mouth. He would leave her here?
The mare turned. Lord Hanley dived toward the coach and reached inside. He spun back with a pistol in his hand. Powder flashed. The mare reared. Shots reverberated in the lane. As Miracle’s attention riveted on the horseman—his rearing mount, the smoking pistols in his hands—the earl whirled and hit out. The barrel of his discharged gun hit her hard on the wrist. The carriage pistol spun from her grasp.
She dived after it, but the earl rammed her aside and swooped to recover the only weapon that was still loaded. His fingers closed on the butt.
Spinning on her hind legs, the highwayman’s horse knocked him aside. The earl scuttled for the safety of the coach as a shod hoof stamped down, pressing the gun into the mud. Dancing in place, the mare trampled it into uselessness. “Come, ma’am!” The rider thrust his empty pistols into his saddlebags and reached down with an open palm. “You would appear to be at odds with your protector. Why not try your chances with me?”
Her heart thundering, Miracle stretched up to grasp his hand. The highwayman swung her onto the saddle in front of him. The mare sprang forward, spraying mud as the earl’s servants ran to help their master.
The highwayman galloped his mount up the lane, then turned to dive into thick woods. Hoofbeats thundered as the mare dodged fast through the trees. Darkness enveloped. Branches whipped past. Encompassed in the highwayman’s sure embrace, Miracle gasped for breath, then laughed.
They came out onto another road, then cantered across a field to pick up a narrow track that led them at last to a towpath. It was almost entirely dark now. The canal reflected a scattering of stars in a surface like ink. Miracle clung to the saddle as they thundered on into the night, then scrambled up a bank into another lane. At last the horse dropped to a walk.
Framed at the end of the hedgerows, Polaris shimmered like a faint white diamond in the northern sky, where Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, and Draco marked the seasons with their stately dance. Miracle tipped her head back into a warm, broad shoulder. More brilliant still, yellow Arcturus and luminous Vega marked the summer heavens high above like a blessing.
The night air washed over her face and eased deep into her lungs, carrying a poignant, bittersweet knowledge. She was rescued and in the same moment entrapped again. But surely her rescuer must now realize the reality of their relationship?
The mare arched her neck and pranced as if she were playing.
“I told you I might need a decent horse,” Ryder said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m a great deal better for your rescue. Thank you.”
His arm tightened around her waist. “Did Hanley hurt you?”
“No, though he was thinking about it. But didn’t you notice? I had the pistol.”
“Yes, I noticed and I’m very glad.”
Miracle relaxed back against the warmth of his body and tried to dismiss her misgivings. “Though it was a close run thing—”
He seemed exuberant, filled with masculine power. “If I thought he’d laid a hand on you against your will, I’d ride back right now to beat him to death.”
“Beat him to death?” Before she completely unraveled, she reached for levity. “You couldn’t simply shoot him?”
“I’ve already emptied both pistols.”
“Ah, the holes in his coach!”
His sudden laugh eased her heart. “When he took those shots at me, I was very tempted to further wound his self-importance, I admit. But since his aim went so wide of the mark, I let mine puncture his carriage door, instead. Those grand crests are very expensive to replace.”
“Which will annoy Lord Hanley no end.”
“That was—partly—the idea.”
Miracle smiled up at him. She wanted to make amends to him for his stunning generosity, recover something of his mirth and his quixotic gallantry, whatever the cost to her heart.
“Stand and deliver?”
His dark eyes met hers. “Devil take it, I’ve wanted to say that ever since I was a boy.”
“But to make the earl strip off his trousers and shoes, so he stood in his shirttails! How could you?”
He laughed again. “I was angry enough, in truth, to do a great deal more than that. However, my primary motivation was simply to delay his pursuit. Though his team is probably no more than a quarter mile up the road, it’ll take time for Hanley to recover everything that you threw over that hedge.”
Her personal misgivings paled in comparison to another reality. Miracle forced herself to voice it. “Yet he’ll have the hue and cry out after Beauty, and she’s very easy to recognize.”
“Unquestionably. Even with my disguise, he must have known it was me.”
“And his servants were witnesses to everything that happened. I know no one can touch a duke’s son, not even for highway robbery, but surely it would still prove awkward?”
“If Hanley did anything other than demanding satisfaction over this escapade, he’d be a laughingstock. Yet it’s a problem, of course, since—though I did my damnedest to make it look as if you were innocent of complicity—capital charges can still be pinned on you.”
“Yes, and for previous crimes, as well as for aiding and abetting a highwayman.” She shuddered as she remembered the earl’s eyes. “You’ve saved me for now, Ryder, but we really should part company before Lord Hanley—”
“Nonsense!” he interrupted. “I don’t give a damn for Hanley, and he has to catch us first.”
“Then I surrender to your superior judgment.”
Miracle said it lightly, but perhaps she really meant it. She was so tired of fighting: for survival, for trying to keep intact a core of compassion that was too often proffered in vain. All of her adult life she had struggled to protect the vulnerable emotio
ns of some men, while suffering the callous disregard of others: something that Lord Ryderbourne, with his honor and gallantry, could never understand.
“Excellent,” he said. “Then my judgment is that we travel on together for now, and devil take the hindmost.”
She took a deep breath. “Where we are? We seem to be heading due north.”
“Physically we’re somewhere in Shropshire, I believe, though I’ve no idea where else you and I may be.”
“Ah!” She glanced up at him. “So it comes to that!”
His gaze searched her face, as if he sought answers to a problem he could barely articulate. “I should have remembered that you never make love unless you want something. And thus I awoke to a fretting horse and nothing but another memory. Should I be annoyed at your flighty habits, or flattered to be the recipient of your professional attentions yet again?”
Her heart began to beat heavily, as if with an awareness that none of the answers she might ever give him would be enough. “If it’s your choice to pursue, may it not be mine to flee?”
“Not when you fall straight into the hands of your persecutor.”
She stared blindly at the sky and tried to strip her voice of emotion. “You’re trying to protect a harlot who’s murdered a gentleman. It’s an endeavor that’s bound to fail. Perhaps I wish to avoid your further entanglement in that inevitable final reckoning.”
“What if I’ve decided the entanglement is worth it?”
“It’s not.”
“That’s my decision to make.” His voice had cooled, also, though obviously that control cost him some effort. “Though you used your seductive skills only to escape me, I can hardly claim not to have enjoyed them.”
“Then I’ve been pursuing the wrong strategy, for now my debts to my knight errant are getting so deep that they can never be repaid.”
“There are no debts.” His arm tensed. The heat of his buried rage scorched over her body. “After all, you’ve been paying as you go.”
The mare broke into a trot, heading uphill toward the stars, then back down into a hollow where a ford slicked like black ink over the road.
Miracle bit her lip. Why did she feel as if her heart were breaking? Women like her didn’t fall in love. They couldn’t afford it. Meanwhile, this heir to a dukedom was trying to offer her his friendship and his protection. He would do so in vain, of course. But it was indeed his choice to make.
“You would prefer us to travel just as comrades once again?” she asked.
“God! My body derides the very idea, but I will not take part in this adventure simply from lust.”
“Does your lust offend you so very much?”
“Not really, but I’m damned if I want your favors as payment. We share a mutual enemy. That alone is enough to justify my being here.”
“Then you think I’m entirely mercenary?”
“Even if you are, perhaps I can simply purchase your time instead of your body, to be paid in cash when our adventure is over.”
She stiffened. “I haven’t asked for your gifts or your condescension. May I not take pride in my own autonomy? My brother Dillard has invested my savings for me for years. When I reach him, I’ll have plenty of money. Travel on with me, if you like, but owe me nothing. I’ll accept your company on those terms and no others, at least until the end of this journey.”
“What if I decide that our journey never ends?”
“You won’t. Like a magnet to a sword blade, Wyldshay will draw you home, and there’s no escaping who I am and what I’ve done. So I’ll throw in my lot with you until I reach my brother’s house, but no further.”
“Are all of your relationships with men negotiated clause by careful clause, like contracts?”
“Of course. What else would they be?”
He rode in silence for a moment, though she still felt the heat of his buried rage.
“Then you have my word on it,” he said at last. “We’re comrades. Now, since I have no desire to have Hanley catch up with us right now, perhaps we should give some thought to our present predicament.” He eased Beauty back to a walk as they approached the black water. “We need to disappear.”
“Yes, I agree. Lord Hanley went to some pains to remind me that he’s feeling very much the avenging angel at the moment. And there was something else—”
“Something else?”
“He wanted to know what I’d done with my valuables. He seemed disproportionately concerned, as if he thought that I’d stolen something from him.”
“And had you?”
“No, I—”
Beauty shied, then jolted to a halt, snorting. Ryder stiffened as if immobilized by ice, his spine rigid. Miracle clutched a handful of mane.
A man had materialized from the darkness to grab the mare’s reins near the bit. The pistol in his other hand pointed at Miracle’s heart.
A second footpad blocked the ford, light glinting faintly from the barrels of two guns clutched one in each fist.
A third man stood close by Beauty’s rump, where Miracle couldn’t quite see him.
“Sit tight,” Ryder murmured to Miracle. “One of our new friends is pressing the point of a knife into the small of my back. We are, regrettably, surrounded.”
“Get your hands up!” the man at the ford said. “No funny business.”
Ryder let the reins slip through his fingers, surrendering control of the mare, and held both hands above his head. “Good evening, sir,” he said calmly. “You would seem to have the advantage of us. You will, however, stand aside.”
Doubt shimmered through the night air at the cool, crisp command in Ryder’s voice. The footpad clutching the mare’s reins seemed to shrink into himself, almost as if he might simply lower his weapon and leave.
But the man at the ford laughed. “Well, if it ain’t His Fake Lordship! You never owned them woods and all them ruined pigsties, did you? You had no one there within earshot to help you, at all! You’re just a scarecrow like us. Though you had me and Jeb fooled for a moment. What are you, an actor?”
“Something like that. But even though you’re as bristling with weaponry as if you’d sprung fully armed from dragon’s teeth, you will allow us to pass.”
“Listen to him, lads!” The man stepped forward with belligerent bravado. “Name’s Bruiser. You want to offer me a fight for the favor, Miss Molly?”
“If you like. However, I strongly recommend that you do as I suggest, Mr. Bruiser.”
The ruffians’ laughter betrayed a dangerously nervous edge, as if they privately feared that Ryder might hold some secret weapon to wreak terrible retribution.
Bruiser set his jaw and gestured with one pistol. “Get down! I won’t say it a second time. Nice and easy, and keep your hands where I can see them.”
“And if I don’t?”
The man spat. “I’d shoot a fancy fellow like you, as soon as look at him.”
“In that case,” Ryder said, “we surrender.”
Miracle glanced once at his face before she slid to the ground. Flat rage burned in his eyes. Yet he smiled at her, then with both hands still in the air, he kicked one leg forward over the mare’s withers and dropped to the road. Beauty jibbed, but Jeb yanked the reins forward over her head and jerked her to a standstill.
“Get the valuables, Tom,” Bruiser said to the man with the knife. “Jeb and I’ll keep you covered, so this pretty cove don’t try anything foolish.”
“My dear sir,” Ryder said. “I may have made mistakes in my life, but I’ve never done anything that foolish. You’ll find my watch in my inside pocket, along with another that’s not quite as fine, but far better than you deserve.”
He stared impassively into space as Tom took his watch and small bag of coins, then Lord Hanley’s watch and purse. The thief whistled when he discovered the diamond cravat pin, then he quickly dropped it into a pocket.
Meanwhile, Jeb had looped Beauty’s reins over his elbow and was rifling about in her saddlebags. The mare
stood quietly, only showing a little nervous white in her eyes as she surrendered to the clumsy handling. Ryder tried to send his mount a silent apology. The mare was just a lovely riding horse, athletic and sound and honest. She knew no more fantastic tricks with which to defend herself from these footpads than Ryder did.
Tom finished his search of Ryder’s clothes, patting down his legs and checking his boots. Keeping the knife at the ready, he leered at Miracle. “And what about you, miss? Any pretty baubles hidden under those skirts?”
“A waste of time,” Ryder said. “There’s nothing else to be found on either of us, except more nails in your coffin.”
The ruffian thrust the point of his knife beneath Ryder’s jaw. “You want me to carve your heart out, Miss Molly?”
Miracle gave a dramatic sigh. “Then you’re not going to search me, after all? Oh, sir! That’s so very gallant!”
Tom lowered the blade to smirk at her. “Hark at that, lads! The lady don’t know that Tom always saves the best for last.”
“Stand still,” Miracle hissed to Ryder. “Do nothing! They want only our money.”
Ryder was hardly aware that he’d moved. Yet he had started to step between Miracle and Tom, only to stare into the barrels of the pistols. One more stride and he would have been either stabbed or gunned down.
He smiled casually and stepped back, though his hands clenched into fists as Tom began an unnecessarily thorough exploration of Miracle’s clothes. Fire emanated from his bones to burn intensely in his veins. Afraid that his face must be marked by black lines of impotent rage, Ryder forced himself to gaze away into the darkness.
So much for his vaunted offer of protection! He was just a bloody useless aristocrat, after all, whose fighting experience had been limited to an occasional bout at Gentleman Jackson’s, and a little practice at the firing range. Yet Miracle bore the groping fingers with a show of supreme indifference, somehow diffusing Tom’s leering pleasure. At last the thief shrugged and turned away.
“Nothing on the mort!” he called to Bruiser. “A fair haul from the cove.”
“Especially that diamond pin?” Ryder asked loudly. “The one that slipped into your pocket?”