After a moment, she heard them moving. Clearly they were heading in her direction. She took a deep breath and finally succeeded in filling her lungs.
“All right, then, just leave her.”
At that, which she heard quite distinctly, Claire looked up. The speaker was James, his tone was urgent, and she had no doubt at all that he was referring to her. Two shapes were coming toward her, black and solid against the charcoal stripes painted by moonlight filtering through the poorly chinked walls. As the shapes drew near they resolved themselves into men and horses. Hugh and James were each astride saddled, bridled mounts.
The snippets of conversation they had previously exchanged flashed through her mind, and she concluded that someone named Minton, anticipating their arrival on the Nadine, had concealed a pair of tacked-up horses for Hugh’s and James’s use in quickly leaving the vicinity.
Realizing that there were only two horses, she had a brief flash of fear that Hugh would agree with James, and they would leave her. What would she do if they did? Her blood ran cold at the thought.
“She’s coming with us.” Hugh’s voice was rough with impatience. Claire gave an inner sigh of relief. Of course he wouldn’t leave her. She should have known he wouldn’t leave her. This was a man she could trust with her life. This was a man she did trust with her life.
“Master Hugh, I’m begging you, think: We only have two horses.”
“She’ll ride with me.”
“We’re riding for our lives!”
“Damn it to hell, James, I’m not leaving her, and that’s the end of the bloody discussion.”
They reached her side at that moment. Claire straightened and took one more deep breath as the animals drew abreast of her. She felt the warmth of their bodies, smelled the leather of their tack mixed with the undefinable scent of horses. One snorted, shaking its head, its bridle jangling.
“Give me your hand,” Hugh said. Looking up, she saw that he was reaching down to her. Like his face, his hand was a pale blur in the darkness. The rest of him was in shadow, a tall, formidable-looking shape looming high above her, mounted as he was on horseback. He kicked his foot out of the stirrup as she put her hand in his.
“Put your foot in the stirrup and swing on behind me.”
She obeyed, and then he was pulling her up behind him as easily as if she weighed no more than a bit of swansdown. There was no choice but to ride astride, Claire realized instantly, although it was not a thing she had ever done. Hitching up her skirts, she gamely swung a leg over and scooted herself into position on the horse’s powerful rump, her bare knees gripping the animal’s warm, prickly hide for balance. Leaning forward, her breasts pressing against his hard back, she wrapped her arms around Hugh’s waist.
“Hang on,” he said over his shoulder. Even as she nodded, he clapped his heels to the horse’s side and it leaped forward. Then they were out of the barn and away, galloping through the muddy field with its stubby remnant of a crop long since harvested. Silent as bats they flew, swift, dark figures with Claire’s cloak flapping like a single great wing behind, just two more indistinct shapes among the other shadows populating the night. Looking south, Claire saw an orange glow lighting the sky: The wagon still burned. The acrid scent of smoke had drifted far enough that she could smell it distinctly. There was another smell, too, mixed with the smoke, and after a moment she identified it as gunpowder. Smuggled from England for use by Napoleon’s army? It seemed so, and the perfidiousness of such an act both shocked and angered her. To think, safe at home, she had never realized that there were traitors all around her, traitors everywhere.
Suddenly she stiffened, and her hands clenched on the heavy wool of Hugh’s coat. Against the blazing backdrop she could just make out the low-slung houses of the village they were rapidly leaving behind. Coming over the rise from the beach, she saw riders. Riders in tall hats . . .
The soldiers had regrouped and were coming in search of them. She had no doubt at all about their object. Could they see the galloping horses fleeing through the dark? She was able to see the soldiers only because they had been briefly outlined against the horizon by the fire, she realized. Please God, let her, Hugh, and James be securely hidden under the blanket of the night. If the soldiers should see them, she feared, they would not stand a chance. As far as she knew, neither Hugh nor James had any kind of workable weapon with them.
All they could do was flee for their lives.
“The soldiers! They’re coming!”
The wind tore the words from her mouth, but Hugh must have heard because he glanced briefly over his shoulder, then nodded. He put his heels to the horse’s sides again. Mud flew from the animal’s hooves, which Claire could feel sliding as it pounded over the muddy ground. Without warning a stone wall appeared in front of them, a long, low, winding ghost in the darkness. Claire barely had time to tense before the horse was up and over. Holding on for dear life, she closed her eyes as they landed awkwardly in the muddy field on the other side, but though it slid a little the horse managed to keep on its feet, and she, knees clenched against its sides, managed to keep her seat. Glancing behind her, she saw James clear the wall, not gracefully but his horse stayed up and he stayed on it, which was all that mattered. Then they careened into the wood, and she hid her face against Hugh’s back as branches slashed, nearly tearing them from the saddle.
They rode for a long time, at first at a dead gallop and then, with the pursuit, as they hoped, now well behind them, at a slightly slower pace. Always they stayed away from the roads, traveling cross-country because the roads, as Hugh warned in a quick exchange with James, were the first places the soldiers would look.
“What about the Nadine’s crew? Won’t they be looking for us too?” If there was a slightly hysterical edge to Claire’s voice, she forgave herself for it. It had been just a little more than twenty-four hours since she had been kidnapped from her carriage—in a crime that had seen her coachman, and possibly her other servants, murdered—had overheard plans for her own murder, hit a vicious brute over the head with a chamber pot, crept out a window, run across a boggy moor for her life, climbed down a cliff so slippery and treacherous that she had feared falling to her death with each step, been hit over the head and kidnapped yet again, nearly drowned, been terrorized and humiliated by a ship’s crew and then by the very man with whom she now fled, been accused of being both a tart and a traitor to her country, held a pistol on her captor only to discover that it was unloaded, been kissed within an inch of her life and discovered that she quite liked kissing and her captor as well, gotten so horribly seasick that for a time she’d wished herself dead, come within a breath of being handed over to enemy soldiers, nearly died in an explosion—and now she was fleeing across the French countryside along with her erstwhile captor and his disapproving henchman while the French army swarmed after them like bees after a honey-stealing bear.
If her nerves were slightly frayed, she thought, hearing the shrill note in her mind, it was certainly no wonder.
“They’ll leave it to the soldiers to make sure we don’t get away. By now half the French army is probably looking for us. They’re after James and me as spies, and you, my dove, because they think you have something they badly want. As far as they’re concerned, you’re Sophy Towbridge, remember, and Sophy Towbridge has information on the entire network of British intelligence operatives in France. That’s what’s in the letters.”
“Oh, dear Lord.” If that was supposed to make her feel better, it didn’t. Instead it scared her to death. If they were hunting spies, the soldiers would never give up. Then it occurred to her that if Sophy Towbridge had information on British intelligence operatives in France, and Hugh, whom the Nadine’s captain had addressed as “colonel,” had kidnapped the supposed Sophy Towbridge to somehow retrieve the information before it could reach those in France who were interested in it and was now being hunted as a spy, then he very likely was one of the British intelligence operatives in question or som
ething very similar.
“Master Hugh! Over there!” James came up beside them before she could ask any questions, his face pale in the darkness, the dark bulk of his body awkward as he leaned over his horse’s neck to point toward the west. Claire looked and gasped. There was just enough moonlight filtering through the blowing clouds to permit her to see what appeared to be an entire regiment of mounted soldiers cantering along a road that ran parallel to their own course. The soldiers were some distance away, perhaps a quarter mile or more, visible only because of the flatness of the farmland through which they rode. Obviously having seen them too, Hugh reined sharply left into the creekbed beside which they rode, and the plunging descent took them down below the level of the surrounding ground. At a word from Hugh they dismounted, and Hugh and James held their animals’ muzzles so that they would not call to the soldiers’ horses as they passed. Claire felt her heart drumming in rhythm to the beat of the flashing hooves, and then the soldiers turned north and rode over the horizon and out of sight.
“Were they looking for us?” Claire asked in a low, shaken voice when they were gone.
“Aye, I’d say so.” James’s response was grim as he clambered back into the saddle with more determination than grace.
“Don’t worry, puss, they won’t find us tonight. I guarantee it.”
Having mounted at the same time as James, though with considerably more ease, Hugh reached down to her as he spoke. She saw the brief gleam of his teeth through the darkness, and realized that he was smiling. Lunatic! she thought, recognizing that in some strange way he was enjoying himself. He found the danger exhilarating. While as for herself—her bottom was sore, her legs were wobbly, and her knees ached from the miles she had already ridden in such an unaccustomed position; she was scared to death, and the only thing she had enjoyed in this whole hideous saga was, if she was honest with herself, kissing Hugh. She would describe herself, if pressed, as the very opposite of exhilarated. But still as she took his hand, put her foot in the stirrup, and allowed him to pull her up behind him, she managed a smile for him in return.
Because—always providing she managed to survive it—she was beginning to feel that meeting him was probably going to be the best thing that ever happened to her in her life.
Then they were off again, and within minutes the smile had been wiped from her face. The horses were traveling like bullets, straight across the countryside as fast as they could go. Riding on the rump of a galloping horse had to be one of the most excruciating experiences of her life, she decided in very short order. Every time the animal bounded forward—that is, just about every other second—her backside was smacked sharply by a mass of bunched muscles as hard as any schoolmaster’s paddle. In addition, the insides of her thighs ached like a sore tooth from gripping so tightly, and her knees felt like they were being rubbed raw by the animal’s rough hide. By the time another hour had passed, Claire was in a state of real misery. She locked her arms around Hugh’s waist, buried her head in his back, and set herself to endure.
Finally they came to what looked like a fishing village, spread out like a horseshoe around a glistening black bay, sleeping in the dead of night. Drooping now with fatigue, leaning heavily against Hugh’s back as the only secure thing in a bouncing world, Claire glanced up bleary-eyed to see the cluster of darkened buildings on the edge of the sea, and for a moment she feared that they had somehow come full circle, ending up right where they had started. But there was no fire burning on the beach, no schooner tied up at the dock, no smell of burning. A glance up at the moon, the merest sliver of silver high overhead occasionally daring to peek through the racing clouds, told her that it was now close on midnight. She did not know where they were, but they had clearly come a long way.
A dog barked nearby, startling her into full wakefulness. They were slowing now, trotting down a muddy track close to what looked like a two-story farmhouse set a little distance from the village proper.
“Where are we?” Claire asked in a hushed voice.
“Somewhere safe. The man who lives here is a friend. He’s expecting us—well, James and me.”
There was a barn behind the house, more of a tumbledown shed really, and Hugh headed inside it with James close behind. A musty smell as of hay allowed to rot greeted them, and overhead a soft fluttering spoke of chickens or pigeons or some other birds roosting in the beams.
“Slide off,” Hugh said, pulling the horse to a halt, and she did, then as she hit the soft turf discovered that her legs would barely support her. Leaning heavily against the horse’s heaving side, hood thrown back and hair tumbling down her back, her hairpins lost somewhere on that wild ride, she watched Hugh dismount, and James.
“I’ll see to the horses,” James said, taking the reins of Hugh’s mount as well as his own. Claire straightened away from the animal as James led it off into the depths of the barn, but as she tried to take a step back she staggered and would have fallen if Hugh had not caught her with both hands on her waist.
“Are you ill?” He was frowning as he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close against his chest. Leaning heavily against him, grateful for his solid strength, comforted by the steady beat of his heart beneath her ear, she shook her head.
“Not ill,” she said. “It is just—I am not accustomed to riding astride.”
He gave a grunt of what sounded suspiciously like laughter. “Saddle sore! Egad, I never thought of that.”
“Do you find the idea amusing?” Faint stirrings of indignation chilled her voice.
“No, puss, no, of course not.” He said it hastily, but Claire still thought she detected the faintest hint of amusement underlying the words. “Poor little girl, you’ve had a bad time of it, haven’t you?”
“I am not,” Claire said with indignation, “a poor little girl.”
Pushing away from him, she again took a step, and nearly fell as excruciating pain shot up her legs.
“Oh!” She couldn’t help the little sound she made any more than she could resist the urge to rub her abused posterior.
He grunted—the sound could have been disguised laughter, she thought darkly, then realized, with a swift glance at his face, that it probably was—and steadied her, then scooped her up in his arms before she could push away again. Claire stiffened, but didn’t struggle. She was so tired, so sore, so frightened, and it felt so good to let him take care of her that she hadn’t the will to fight any longer. She abandoned her irritation at him to curl close against his chest, wrapping her arms around his neck as if right where she was was the one place on earth she most wanted to be.
Which, indeed, it was.
19
“I’m sorry.” Hugh sounded genuinely remorseful as he walked out of the barn with her and headed across the muddy lot toward the farmhouse. The moonlight struck his eyes, turning them to silver as he looked at her. With her head nestled on his shoulder, their eyes were just inches apart. “Sorry for everything. Sorry you had to get caught up in this.”
“I’m not,” Claire said, inhaling the musky aroma of him with every breath and feeling the warm strength of the muscles that cradled her clear down to her toes. “At least, not altogether. If I hadn’t gotten caught up in this, I never would have met you.”
He looked down at her sharply, and his lips parted as if he would reply. Then squelching footsteps behind them heralded James’s arrival.
“I rubbed ’em down and fed ’em.” His gaze swept over the two of them and he frowned, but if he had aught to say about her being carried so carefully in his master’s arms he kept it to himself.
“What other animals are in there?”
“A plow horse. Some chickens, a cow, and a couple of nanny goats.”
“Hildebrand’s not arrived, then.”
“I’d say not.” James turned a frowning glance on Claire, then cleared his throat. “Master Hugh, have you given any thought as to what the general’s liable to say about her?”
Hugh grimaced. “He can sa
y what he likes. I intercepted the wrong woman, and there’s an end to it. The only thing to do is send her home safely, and get everyone we have searching for the real Sophy Towbridge.”
James coughed delicately. “Are you sure . . . ?”
“I’m sure.”
They reached the back stoop then, which was no more than a couple of planks laid over a base of rocks set into the ground. Before they could knock, the door opened. A man, a farmer by the looks of him, with illkempt chestnut hair and a straggly beard of the same color, dressed in a loose shirt, breeches, and brogues, stood in the aperture looking at them suspiciously, a lantern in his hand.
“Well met, Tinsley.”
“Colonel! Thank God! I was that afeard something had gone wrong—you’re late. And General Hildebrand’s not here yet.” His voice with its hint of cockney revealed that Tinsley was no more French than Claire was. Was he an intelligence agent too? Her eyes widened at the thought.
“Something did go wrong,” Hugh said, carefully maneuvering Claire through the narrow doorway as Tinsley, after a nod at James, stepped back for him to enter. Claire clung to Hugh’s neck. If he put her down, she wasn’t sure she could even stand, much less walk. “I’ll tell you all about it, but first I must see the lady here taken care of. Have you a bedchamber where she can rest?”
“Aye, upstairs.” Tinsley evinced no surprise at the presence of an unexpected female guest. In the spy game, Claire supposed, one learned to expect the unexpected.
“Lead the way.”
James closed the door behind them, and, with Tinsley’s lantern lighting the way, Hugh carried Claire up the narrow stairs and into a bedroom. It was small and very simple, its furnishings consisting of no more than a lumpy-looking bed piled high with colorful quilts, a wardrobe, a washstand, and a straight-backed chair. The walls were rough whitewashed plaster. The floor was dark scuffed wood. As Tinsley lit a candle by the bed, Hugh set Claire on her feet. Pain shot up her legs, and she immediately tottered a step and sank down in the chair, then winced as her backside made it clear that it was not in any state to welcome contact with a wooden seat.
Irresistible Page 18
