Chapter 8
Meghan fought to keep her wits about her. Aside from a short battle in the snow, Meghan had not fought her captor. Whatever he had used to render her unconscious hadn’t had a lasting effect. He had just settled Meghan across his lap when she roused.
She hadn’t even panicked when she discovered herself bound and blindfolded. Well, for a moment she had.
She had quickly regained her composure and put up a rather solid performance at being unconscious. The entire ride, Meghan conserved her energy, saving it for a fight, and intently listened for some hint of where he was taking her, planning her moment.
At last, she had her answer.
He had brought her to a tavern.
Meghan had visited enough inns along the English and Scottish roads that even blindfolded she recognized the clang of tankards. The stale stink of Mundungus tobacco smoke, roasted meat, and pungent spices. The off-key ribald songs of drunken revelers.
A cold shiver raced along her spine.
Do not think about it…Do not think about it…
As a girl with a vivid imagination that led to too many nightmares, Meghan learned to talk herself through the terror, until she fell back to sleep.
Using that same mantra now couldn’t help.
This moment was real.
Bound and blindfolded, with only a wall of blackness before her, each harsh drag of Meghan’s breath thundered in her ears.
Any cries she made, any screams, were futile. They would be lost to the raucous shouts and laughter below.
Her chest heaved in fast, shallow spasms.
Panic tightened its grip.
To think she had spent the past weeks, all the way up to this very day, mourning her impending marriage to the Duke of Hartwell.
Her mother, aunt, sisters, cousins, and brother had wed for love, while Meghan would stand alone in a marriage built on convenience and connections. Meghan could not have imagined a greater travesty than a loveless union.
She had stolen a single night of fun for herself, and the duke had taken her to task like a child for it. From that aberrant night alone, she had built him into a monster in her mind.
All the way on her journey to the church, Meghan had contemplated running from the Duke of Hartwell.
At last, the universe delivered. She had gotten exactly what she asked for.
Only now, robbed of that fate—and of a future—she wanted to fall to her knees and take back all her greedy hopes and wishes.
For there would be no marriage—not a loving one, nor a convenient one. Meghan had not merely been relieved of her valuables; she had been abducted by a highwayman.
She swallowed back a wave of nausea.
A highwayman who had slapped her buttocks and handled her like she was a common tart, his cruel touch nothing like August’s sweet, masterful caress.
As if he had followed Meghan’s tormented musings and sought to pile upon her sorrow, the dastard touched two callused fingers to her face and glided them along her cheek with a gentleness that bespoke familiarity. Warmth.
Her pulse quickened under her bindings, the response as inexplicable as it was unwelcome.
Somehow, she scraped together one last vestige of fight.
“You bloody coward,” she spat. “No man worth his salt would drag an unwilling woman, bind and blindfold her, and spirit her away.”
“Ah, mais on vous a déjà bandé les yeux, oui?”
Meghan stilled. Her ears sharpened first on his thick, velvety French accent, and then his words.
“…Ah, but you’ve been blindfolded before, yes…?”
Meghan’s heart beat faster.
“N’avez-vous jamais joué au jeu d’enfant du colin-maillard?”
She furrowed her brow.
“…Have you not played the child’s game Blindman’s Buff…?”
There was something familiar about the slightly mocking but playful quality of his speech. Every syllable rolled from his lips in the practiced way of a rogue.
She lifted her chin in the direction his voice came. “You know me!”
Silence answered her.
Heat flushed through her body. “You bastard! I want to see you.”
He chuckled, and the low, sonorous timbre resonated so near that she recoiled.
“Je veux que tu me voies,” he purred, in the tones of the masked highwaymen she read about, not real ones.
Meghan frowned.
“If you want me to see you, then remove my blindfold at once!” she demanded, her voice creeping up. “Who are you?”
His answer did not come fast enough.
“Will you not say something?” she cried.
“I am a lady, and I was on my way to meet my bridegroom at the altar. You have destroyed me and my future. The least you can do is show your face!” This time the sobs broke free, ripped from a place of sorrow as vast and bitterly cold as the winter storm that raged outside.
The heat of his savage physique reached her as he hovered over her like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, arrived for the first of his conquests—destroying Meghan.
Her captor rested a strong, powerful palm along her back and drew her near.
Meghan unleashed her fury, fear, and sorrow; curling her fingers into fists, she beat at his chest with her bound hands, pounding at the place where a heart should be.
“Je ne t’aurais jamais cru capable de pleurer,” he murmured, almost soothingly.
Soothingly? Was she mad?
“In fact, I am a crier. A great big one, and if you do not release me…” Meghan stiffened.
Meghan’s pulse stopped a beat.
“You know who I am,” she charged breathless with a newfound hope. “Then you also realize I am to marry the Duke of Hartwell this morning. Anything you want, if it is money you seek, my betrothed will give you whatever you want.”
Hartwell held Meghan in contempt long before her capture. He wouldn’t marry her after this. But she had no doubt that if the code of gentlemanly honor ingrained into him didn’t drive him to pay for her release, then the fact their siblings were married would.
Some unknown, ominous undercurrent pulsed in the air.
His silence overwhelmed.
“The Duke of Hartwell will make you rue the day—”
“If you think I’m afraid of Hartwell or any man, you are a fool,” he whispered. “And I never took you for a goose.”
Meghan drew up.
This voice she knew. Her heart thundered against her ribcage. She could place his silken, smooth tones in her sleep. They were the same ones she heard in every waking moment of her life and the ones that stole her sleep.
After the explosive, hurtful end to their exchange at Lord and Lady Rutland’s masquerade, Meghan had been certain August could never see anything beyond Meghan’s McQuoid name. He’d hurled hateful accusations.
“…Ah, Meghan with her bruised pride. You are so desperate, you crave scraps of some attention even from an Archdale…”
The sharp hiss of a blade cut through the air, and she gasped. The bindings fell away from her hands. Blood rushed with excruciating pain to those constricted limbs. He freed the tie about her ankles next.
The fight and fear left her.
In her misery, she had failed to see with any clarity, but now she heard what had been buried in his cruelty at the Rutland’s affair—August’s pain. His insecurity. First, Linnie chose Captain Tremaine over August, and then Meghan had been set to marry another Tremaine.
Needing to see him, Meghan’s fingers numb and stiff as blood worked through them. She struggled with her blindfold. Her fingers shook from a different sense of urgency.
The moment Meghan tossed the satin fabric to the floor, she blinked, adjusting to the change in lighting.
And with her vision clear, she had every desperate dream confirmed.
With Meghan in full kneel and August’s legs touching the edge of the bed, neither spoke. They stared at one another. Shadows played along the angular planes of his face, and she trailed her gaze over each beloved one. In the dim light, his ocean-blue eyes appeared preternatural.
“August?” she exhaled his name.
He curled his lips into that same wicked smile that had gotten the Dark Lord evicted from God’s graces. “Hullo, love,” he murmured. “Fancy meeting again.”
Her heart soared.
Love.
His hands came up between them and gathered at her cloak’s fastening.
His welcome visage blurred. A fresh wave of tears again formed in her throat; these ones so very different than the ones Meghan had shed for months on end. Hers were happy tears.
He stopped.
A deep frown gathered at his forehead. “Tears.” He grunted. “I really did not take you for a crier.”
The similar observation came not in French this time, but in his flawless King’s English.
Meghan buried something between a sob and a laugh in a fist. “P-perhaps we can agree that there are many things we do not know about each other.”
But in time, with Meghan now saved from an unwanted marriage, she and August could learn those intimate secrets about one another.
A radiant heat fanned through her, enveloping her heart.
She could not take her eyes from him: the chiseled line of his jaw and sharp cheekbones were now covered in the same light beard he had worn when she first met him.
Scarcely daring to believe any of this was real, Meghan sank back on her haunches.
August caught her by her tiered shoulder cape and dragged her gently back up. His fingers made effortless work of the engraved silver brooch at her throat.
She watched him, transfixed.
August swept the heavy, sodden cloak from her shoulders.
When she last saw him, she had believed that was the last she would ever see of him.
He had come for Meghan.
Impossible.
August awoke his own brief trance. “Oh, no, my dear Meghan.” He hurled her wedding cloak across the room. It hit the floor with a wet thump. “I assure you, I am very real.”
A quivering smile formed on her lips.
Yes, he was.
This was.
With an easy grace, he crawled on both knees with more grace than most men walked on two feet to reach her.
He curled his right palm about her nape.
His possessive hold burned away the cold from her body; her lashes fluttered.
A knock at the door shattered the moment.