Princess of Thieves (Shifters of Sherwood #2)

Chapter One

I ’ve always been weirdly proud of the fact that I never get carsick, but I might be breaking my perfect record today. The man at the wheel isn’t a bad driver—far from it. In fact, he navigates the Range Rover with a fluid grace you rarely see outside of Formula One drivers. The long wheelbase and cushy leather seats mean I’m riding in comfort, barely feeling any of the bumps in the rural Virginia road. But my pulse is pounding, my knuckles white as I grip the seat beneath me, and my mouth is as dry as the Sahara.

Because this man is a stranger.

All I know is that his name is Guy Gisbourne, he drives a car I hate, and he can’t have anything good in store for me.

He glances back at me from the driver’s seat. “You look uncomfortable.” It’s a statement, not a question. I swallow, even though my mouth is dry, and do my best to fix him with an intense glare in the rearview mirror.

I say nothing. I have nothing to say. Adrenaline is shooting through my veins like I’ve just chugged a quadruple espresso. A brief flutter of panic stirs in my chest, because what if I’m about to have—I would say a seizure, but I know now that’s not what they are—a spell, an incident. God, I wish I knew more about what’s wrong with me. Or not wrong with me, I guess. But up with me. I shake my head, the world careening around me as I do.

“Are you?” he prompts again. I can see that orthodontist-perfected smile gleaming in the rearview mirror.

“Huh?” I ask, too startled to stay silent. It’s been a long day, maybe the longest day of my life, or at least the longest since Mama and Daddy died. I don’t even know what time it is. I slide my smartphone out from my back pocket and look at the screen. It’s been hours since I left Sherwood County, but I wasn’t taking a direct route. I wasn’t driving anywhere in particular, except away from that house, from those men, from—I can’t even think about it. It’s too painful.

“I asked,” the driver says with impeccable diction, just the hint of a Southern accent coloring his words, “if you were uncomfortable.”

Shit, I’ve engaged with him. There’s no way I can stay silent anymore.

I purse my lips, tuck my arms tight around me, glance left and right at the different windows of the car, as if there’s someone there who will back me up, and then decide to stare at my feet. “I’m fine,” I bite out.

“You really should be thanking me,” he says. After a moment, the only sound in the car is the whooshing of the air conditioning and the faint whispering sounds of the air outside skating over the sleek surface of the car. “You could have been in a lot of trouble back there.”

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong.” The words fly out of my mouth before I have a chance to stop them.

An amused expression flickers over his face. “Oh, I’m sure you weren’t. And that’s why the State Police pulled you over. They’re known for harassing drivers for no good reason, after all.”

A feisty retort, something about how, in fact, they do tend to do that—although admittedly not to nice, innocent-looking girls like me—but I have the good sense to hold back, to say nothing in fact, and just look out the window. I don’t know where we are. I didn’t know where I was when that state trooper pulled me over in the Mustang and almost hauled me in before this guy pulled up and hustled me into the back seat of this car. This car—Range Rover, long wheelbase, UVA alumnus license plate. Something pings in the recesses of my memory. That first night—the night I went back to the garage to find the documents that John had about me to trap me in that conservatorship. The night I ran away in the Mustang, pursued by... well, I don’t know who, but they were driving this kind of car.

Terror clutches at my chest. It was him. It was whoever he is.

Outside, through the tinted windows and the cool evenness of the air conditioning, we turn from rolling golden hills to trees and woodlands, lands like Sherwood, like home, like the house, where...

No, I can’t think about it.

“Where are you taking me?” I blurt out.

Again, amusement flickers over his face. I study him as best I can without giving myself away, flicking sideways glances to the rearview mirror. Before that night at the Fox Hunt Club, when I’d shown up as essentially an accomplice with the four of them.

Rob, Tuck, LJ, and Will.

My heart squeezes just thinking of them.

I’d never seen this guy before in my life. And yet, he knows me, or can pretend to know me. I gave him a fake name, but he knew who I really was.

My mind spins with possibilities: a drug lord my dad owed money to—that’s painful to admit, hard to reconcile, but a real possibility, so I have to acknowledge it; some rich asshole in cahoots with the sheriff; a total random who spotted me and somehow managed to track me down and has some in with the police to take me off their hands.

“Don’t you worry about it, Maren,” he says to me. The sound of my name in his mouth makes the hair on the back of my neck prickle, like I’ve spotted a predator and need to run.

“Where are you taking me?” I demand again.

Behind his sunglasses, his eyes flick to the rearview mirror and stare at me. The smile that curls over his lips is condescending, almost pitying, yet I can tell he thinks he’s being kind. “Somewhere safe,” he says softly. “You don’t have to worry anymore.”

“I wasn’t worried until you kidnapped me from the side of the road,” I snap back. Too late, I realize that I probably shouldn’t unload the sass onto him. Who knows what he’s capable of? Between this car and his slick demeanor, he has the makings of a high-dollar hitman, and, glancing at his fit form and strong hands on the wheel, he could totally throttle the life out of me without a second thought, ditch my body somewhere in Sherwood Forest, and no one would be the wiser—or even care—until I was rotted away to nothing.

Except the four of them, my mind insists. Wouldn’t they care? Wouldn’t they miss me?

No, I command myself. It doesn’t matter. They lied. They manipulated me. They used me like a pawn. Like a stupid silly girl. Like everything that Uncle John said I was.

Like a whore.

“I’m taking you to my place,” he goes on, an unexpected elaboration that startles me to attention, away from the branches flicking past my window. “My home, that is,” he clarifies. “From what I gather, you haven’t had a proper place to live in quite a while.”

I don’t know how to answer that, so I don’t. It’s true—I haven’t really had a home in the sense of a place that truly belongs to me. For, God, I don’t know, years. Since I was thirteen. Since before my dad got loaded on heroin, crashed his car, killed his wife and himself, and left me an orphan in the care of a scumbag who wanted nothing more than to milk me for all my inheritance was worth.

I can’t deny that Rob’s house was luxurious, that it fulfilled every need I had—even those I didn’t know were buried deep inside me.

Again, my skin prickles at the thought of that expansive pool, that garage full of cars, those impossible moments that now I know were total fiction.

No, fiction is too kind a word. They were lies.

But just because I’m coming from that doesn’t mean I want to be stuck with this guy. He could be anything. Anyone. And the mere fact that he knows more about me than I know about him puts me on instant alert.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” he says, as though he can read my mind.

The car slows. We’ve come to a stop sign. I realize I have no idea how long we’ve been driving. He signals left and turns. I study his face in the rearview, but his eyes are on the road now, cloaked by his Ray-Bans.

“Should I?” I ask.

He chuckles. “I wouldn’t presume anything like that. I’m just a humble public servant. But if you did, you’d know that I was trustworthy.”

“I’d hope.” I’m not following. “What do you mean?” I say.

“Oh, we did get acquainted at the Fox Hunt Club,” he goes on. “Didn’t we? Although you didn’t quite reveal who you were.”

I don’t know how to answer that. I lick my lips and tuck my arms tighter around myself. “I’m not anyone noteworthy,” I say at last.

“You’re Richard de Mornay’s daughter,” he corrects with a small laugh. “You really think that’s not noteworthy?”

Hearing my father’s name from his lips sends a chill over my skin that has nothing to do with the cranked-up air conditioning in this stupid car.

“I don’t know what I think about that,” I say, and it’s the honest truth. It’s one thing to love your daddy, to be proud of the work he did as a federal prosecutor, to think that he was out there fighting the bad guys and taking down criminals.

It’s another to learn that he was basically a junkie, an addict who was a slave to his addiction and made his family suffer for it—to the point of killing himself and his wife and leaving his daughter an orphan. And it’s another thing entirely to know that his daughter ended up fucking the very dealer who sold him the stuff that killed him that night.

But that’s...that’s different.

“Are you going to murder me?” I ask. It’s a stupid and straightforward question, but fuck it. I’ve got nothing to lose.

I tighten my grip around my smartphone, just barely thinking that maybe, just maybe, Rob, Will, LJ, and Tuck are worried about where I am, that they’re coming to find me, that they’re on their way to rescue me.

But I’m not going to hold out hope.

My driver, Guy, chuckles again. He strikes me as the kind of man who never laughs—only chuckles, only ever doles out his reactions in small doses, controlled, careful. And I don’t like that. It reminds me too much of Uncle John, of the Sheriff, of everything about Sherwood County that I was hoping to leave behind.

“Oh, not hardly,” he says. “Maren, don’t you know what I’ve just done?”

Scoop me up from the middle of bumfuck and leave my car behind, I want to say. Taken me away from the police so you could do something much more nefarious than throw me in the county jail like they would have.

“I saved you,” he says.

The sound outside the car goes from the smooth hiss of pavement to the crunch of gravel, and I look out the window again. We’ve turned down a road I don’t recognize. We’ve passed the forest and entered farmland, through a neat set of gates with curlicue end posts, down a road flanked with trees dripping with Spanish moss.

“You’d gotten tangled up in something awful, regrettable,” he goes on. “A nice girl like you, from a nice family like yours. Which, I must say, pity what happened to your mommy and daddy, but not your fault at all.” He clucks his tongue a little.

“But maybe you didn’t know any better. You didn’t have a great role model. Didn’t have anyone really to look after you for so long. Didn’t have anyone to teach you how to be a lady and to come up in this world proper.”

A cold sweat hits my skin when I hear him say the word “lady.”

“But as soon as I saw you that night at the Fox Hunt Club, I knew. I knew who you were. I knew you needed out. I knew you needed help. And then, once I realized you’d fallen from John Lackland into a bad crowd, well, I made it my personal mission to get you into the kind of life you deserve—safe, secure, respectable.”

The car slows. The crank of the emergency brake sounds, and we stop.

My pulse quickens as I try to peer through the windshield. Before us is a bona fide Southern mansion, Antebellum-style, flanked by manicured gardens, with a massive porch—the works. It reminds me of Rob’s house. It’s a lot like Rob’s house, and yet it’s different.

This is a new place entirely, and I’m not sure I like it.

“So when I hear a report over the police scanner that a stolen Mustang has been spotted miles out of Sherwood County, well, I take it on myself to intervene.” He’s staring at me now in the rearview mirror, dark eyes fixated.

“That’s just the kind of liberty you can take when you’re in my position. A courtesy call to help someone in need.”

“I don’t need help,” I spit back. “I need you to take me back to my car. I need...”

But I trail off, my heart squeezing. Daddy’s Mustang, left God knows where and for God knows who. “What the hell do you mean, ‘your position’?” I add, typical of some rich boy like him, whose daddy’s daddy’s daddy was one of the founders of the Fox Hunt Club, to act like he’s hot shit.

“I’m so sorry,” he says with artificial deference. “I assumed you knew. I’m Guy Gisbourne, Attorney at Law, and if I do say so myself, I’m an influential person here in Sherwood County.”

Here. The word resonates in my mind. We’re back. We’re back. I’m back. I’m stuck and trapped in exactly the county I was trying to escape, the one I briefly thought I could make a life in with the four of them—the four outlaws, the four shifters .

I’m still not used to the word in my mind, but they actually gave a damn about this place and wanted to turn it into something meaningful.

They actually cared for me, or pretended that they did.

“I don’t care who you are,” I say, my voice shaking. “Or how influential you claim to be around here. You can’t just take me like this. I want out. I need to get out.” And as if I finally realize that it’s an option, I lunge for the car door and yank on the handle, but it’s locked—firmly.

I tug and tug, the handle clicking and clunking in my hand, but it’s no good. That door isn’t budging. In the driver’s seat, Guy smiles a wry smile at me, like I’m a dove ramming against the bars of its cage.

“Oh, I can, Maren,” he says gently. “Because you owe me. You owe me a great deal.”