Read On. #2
"There is no mistake. You descended from a second-story window," he said, "at the appointed time and without hesitation."
Sophie considered him steadily. On several levels, that was wrong.
"I hesitated a great deal," she said.
Impatience moved through him — visible in the set of his jaw, in the slight compression of his mouth. He was, she suspected, a man who had planned this evening carefully, and was now required to revise.
"Come."
"You have neglected to mention where," Sophie said. "Do you provide a brochure?"
"You will answer questions."
"Ah." She nodded. "An interrogation. How festive."
She glanced back at the lit windows of the house, golden and warm behind the glass.
She could scream. Her mother would collapse in silk and outrage.
Lucinda would shriek. Mr. Larkins, seized by the sudden prospect of heroism, would attempt a rescue and likely cripple himself on a decorative table.
By morning the affair would tear through London with the velocity usually reserved for royal indiscretions.
Her name would survive in whispers for three seasons and perhaps in print for three generations.
The prospect exhausted her. She thought of the drawing room. The careful seating. Mr. Larkins's thumb. The word amenable. She thought of what she had wanted, out here in the dark.
"Fine," she said.
The stranger's grip tightened. "Fine?"
"I would prefer to avoid screaming," Sophie replied. "It is painfully conventional. And you’ll quickly realize how foolish you’re being so best to get this over with."
He regarded her with a new quality of attention — less like a man conducting an abduction, and more like a man who had discovered, midway through a familiar operation, that one of the components was behaving unlike any component he had previously encountered.
"You believe cooperation will improve your situation."
"By no means," Sophie said. "But it may improve my mother's, and I have already put her through enough this evening by exiting through the scenery."
That stopped him. Only for an instant — a small, involuntary pause — but she caught it in the dark. Her refusal to behave with proper victimhood had damaged the architecture of his evening, and something about that gave her an almost unseemly satisfaction.
"If this is an abduction," she continued, "is it at least a competent one? I have no patience for chaos."
He seemed genuinely offended. "It is sufficient."
"Well," Sophie said. "That is a relief. I would hate to be kidnapped by an amateur."
He guided her toward the outer hedge — firm and efficient at the wrist, like a man accustomed to moving reluctant things in particular directions.
Beneath the black spread of a great elm stood a waiting carriage, dark and unlit, the horses standing with uncanny stillness.
The driver above them was barely more than a shape against the sky, coat collar turned up, face averted.
Sophie slowed.
No spontaneous act of male stupidity, this.
Planning. Real planning. Logistics.
"Oh," she murmured.
So, a kidnapping. A real one. Not the social variety engineered by ambitious mothers with eligible sons and strategic seating, but an actual abduction — complete with conveyance, staffing, and, she suspected, a destination someone had already arranged.
She looked at him again with renewed, genuinely curious interest. "May I ask whom you believe me to be? Or do you reserve that for the second act?"
"You will answer questions," he said.
Sophie tilted her head. "You are quite repetitive. Does that tend to help in society?"
"Get in."
He opened the carriage door. The interior breathed out at her — expensive leather, cold night air, and the particular smell of paid discretion, of spaces maintained for purposes that weren't discussed in drawing rooms.
Sophie took one last look at the garden — the lit windows, the roses she had wronged, the perfectly temperate evening she was leaving behind — adjusted the hidden book against her ribs, and decided that if one must be abducted, one might as well do it with grace.
In the novels she kept hidden where no respectable person would think to search, the heroine would have fainted elegantly or defended her virtue in long, trembling speeches that concluded in tears and a wedding.
Sophie felt no pull toward either course.
What she felt instead, rising through her chest with an impropriety she declined to examine, was a bright, unmistakable flare of relief.
She had wanted an adventure. She had stood in drawing rooms for three seasons, invisible and restless and quietly furious, and she had wanted one. She had simply lacked the imagination to picture it arriving with its own carriage.
She gathered her skirts and climbed in.
"If this will take awhile," she said, settling on the bench with what remained of her dignity, "I trust you have decent lighting. I brought a book, and I refuse to squint."
The man paused on the threshold. In the faint, distant light from the house she could just make out his expression — the precise, arrested look of a man whose careful abduction had acquired an unforeseen complication, and who was already beginning to suspect that it would not be the last.
Then he stepped in after her.