The Captive #2
I came with a soft gasp, my inner muscles squeezing helplessly around nothing, and my eyes flashed open to stare up at the canvas above my head.
Well.
The orgasm was disappointingly empty, but it would serve its purpose.
I pulled my gown down, blew out the candle, dropped A Harlot’s Guide atop my valise with my daily accessories, and rolled over.
Sleep wasn’t something I took for granted these days, but at least my body was relaxed enough now to allow my mind to quiet…
I didn’t sleep through the night—I rarely did these days—and I was awake before dawn, when the camp began to stir. I laid silently, listening to the soft calls of the men as they built the fire back up from embers, the gentle sounds from the horses, and Semyon grunt orders.
When the orders turned to yells and Juno released a terrified whinny, accompanied by the sounds of hoofbeats and a gunshot, I sat up straight on my mattress.
Across the tent, Hobbs’ terrified gaze met mine. “Stay quiet,” I snapped, as I reached for my robe.
“My lady!” she gasped, but I ignored her. This wasn’t the first time my traveling party had met with adventure, but I hadn’t been with these men long enough to know how they would react.
So after yanking my robe closed, I dug into my valise past A Harlot’s Guide, my fingers closing around cold metal. The pistol lived in my traveling case, primed, because a sensible woman does not sleep unarmed a hundred miles past the last magistrate.
“Your Grace, no—” Hobbs had her blanket clutched to her chin, eyes white-rimmed in the gloom. “Please, they’ll kill you—”
“Stay in the tent.”
Juno screamed again.
Any horsewoman knows that sound. Not her spook-at-grouse whinny, not her indignation at a late feed—terror, high and raw, the noise a horse makes when the world is ending and she is calling for a trusted friend to save her.
That sound pulled me through the tent flap barefoot, robe unbelted, plait swinging, into the grey hour before dawn.
Into chaos.
Riders poured through my camp. A dozen at least, weaving through the wagons and the guy-ropes at a canter, and my first thought—before fear, before sense—was that I had never seen riding like it in my life.
They sat their horses as though they’d grown there.
Reins slack on the neck, both hands free, turning tight around a wagon tongue with nothing I could see but a shift of weight.
One man hung half off his mount’s shoulder at speed to snatch a saddlebag from the ground and came upright again laughing.
The horses themselves were nothing—shaggy, short-coupled, big ugly heads, the same rough little beasts my guards rode—and they threaded the wreck of my camp like swallows.
I had paid riding masters in three countries. Not one of them could have sat the worst horse here.
My guards knelt in a row by the supply wagon, disarmed, one of them bleeding from his nose.
Semyon stood apart with his hands held wide, talking low and steady in Russian, in the voice a wise man uses on a green colt.
And Pyotr Ilyich lay unconscious by the rekindled fire, blood in his hair, his spectacles winking in the trampled grass a yard from his open hand.
At the picket line, two riders were already cutting my horses loose.
“Stop!” The word came out of me with the whole force of my rank behind it, and it did nothing at all. Hector was rearing against his rope. Juno had backed to the end of hers, ears flat, hindquarters bunched.
“Get away from them!” I screamed, stumbling toward my precious animals.
That was when the leader turned.
He sat a dark, compact horse at the center of the camp, still as a post while his men flowed around him, and he found me across the wreckage—a woman in her nightclothes with a pistol in her fist—and even at twenty paces I watched his interest kindle.
I looked back; I confess it freely.
He was bareheaded, dark hair rough from the ride, a short beard along a jaw that owed nothing to any valet or ballroom affectation.
A scar came down out of that beard, one clean pale line from jawbone toward his collar, vanishing under the coat.
Broad through the shoulder, easy in the saddle as a man in his favorite chair, and younger than I expected—perhaps a few years younger than myself.
Young enough to have been my son’s tutor, though nothing else about him suggested the schoolroom.
He was, and I say this as a woman of six-and-thirty who has seen the masculine treasures of four capitals, magnificent.
You wanted an adventure.
Fear was in me somewhere, cold in my stomach, real. It simply…wasn’t the loudest thing.
His gaze traveled from my bare feet up over the robe, unhurried, and arrived at my face wearing frank appreciation, a faint approving smile—and then he looked away, at Juno fighting her rope, and his whole expression sharpened.
He called something in Russian to the men at the picket line, two short words, and jerked his chin at my horses.
I did not need a translator for that.
I raised the pistol and leveled it at his chest. “Do not touch Juno and Hector!”
Really, I was quite proud of how level my voice sounded, and it worked.
One of the leader’s fists rose. The riders stopped—all of them, everywhere, mid-motion, as though I’d shouted a spell instead of my babies’ names. In the sudden quiet I could hear Juno’s snorting and my own blood in my temples.
The leader looked at me down the length of my aim and said something in Russian. Rich voice, unhurried, and unmistakably amused. A ripple of laughter went through his men.
I glanced at my unconscious interpreter, knowing he couldn’t help me. Semyon watched me, jaw tight, and offered nothing.
Whatever the outlaw had said, I would not be getting it in French, and the laughter was still running around the circle of riders, and my arm was beginning to shake.
So I gave up on Russian entirely.
“Touch my horses, monsieur,” I shouted in French, “and I will put a ball through your heart!”
The grin that broke across his face was sudden, delighted, and intriguing.
“With that pistol, madame?” he answered—in French. Fluent, easy, drawing-room French, barely roughened at the edges. “At this distance? I invite you to try. But your accent is also Parisian, and now I am intrigued.”
An educated outlaw?
Somewhere south of Voronezh, at the ragged edge of the map, a bandit chief had just addressed me in better French than my late husband ever managed.
He swung down from his horse while I was still staring, shocked—beautiful movement, no stirrup-hop, just off and landing soft as a cat. He dropped his reins on the ground, and the ugly little horse stood as though tied to a post. The animals were well-trained, I would give them that.
On his feet, this bandit leader lost nothing. Some big men diminish when they dismount. He somehow seemed more impressive.
He crossed the camp toward me at a saunter.
Perhaps it was the shock of the situation, that allowed my focus to narrow to just him. But it seemed as if I couldn’t take my gaze from him as he slowly approached, my hands aching from my grip on the pistol.
He dressed in clothing I’d never seen before: A long dark coat, fitted through the chest and skirted like nothing in London, with a row of silver-tipped cartridge cases sewn slantwise across each breast—ornament and ammunition at once. A crimson sash wound at his waist, a long knife through it.
The sabre at his hip hung in a scuffed black scabbard, worn low, and it had none of a gentleman’s sword-furniture about it; it looked like a tool that got used.
Dust to the knee of his boots. He wore all of it carelessly, and it made every man I’d ever danced with or flirted with or smiled at look like… well, foppish affections.
Adventure indeed.
I took a step back. My heel found a tent stake and I stopped, which robbed the retreat of considerable dignity.
“We have followed your party four days,” he said conversationally, still coming.
“Since the river. You should dismiss your guards, by the by—they never once looked behind them.” Another few steps.
“I intended only your silver, madame. Silver is easily carried and easily spent. But then…” His grin bloomed again, too charmingly. “Then we saw the tracks.”
“The tracks?” I whispered, confused.
“Long stride. Heavy shoes. Nothing of this country makes a track like that.” He stopped a few paces off, and his eyes went past me to Juno, and the admiration in them was a horseman’s, thorough and assessing, and somehow that frightened me more than greed would have.
“English blood horses, here. Do you know what such animals are worth, so far from England? A prince in Taganrog would beggar himself.”
He meant to sell them.
Sell Juno, whom I had foaled with my own hands at two in the morning against the advice of every man on the estate. Sell Hector to some prince’s stable to be ruined by hard hands?
The pistol had drooped. I brought it back up between his eyes, and my arm did not shake now.
“They are my babies,” I said. “I bred them. I raised them. You may have my silver and my plate and every trunk in that wagon, monsieur, but you will not take my horses from me.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. The charmed smile didn’t leave his lips—I doubted the charm left it while he slept—but between one heartbeat and the next, his dark eyes glinted with real anger. Real danger.
I sucked in a breath as he growled, “I will have them, my lady,” and stalked toward me.
Instinctively, in sudden fear, my finger tightened on the trigger and the shot cracked out the same time as a terrified little scream.
I would tell it more heroically if I could—a decision, an aim.
But the truth is his hand had already closed on my wrist, wrenching upward, and the ball went harmlessly over his shoulder into the sky, the powder-flash highlighting us both in the dawn glow.