masked man didn’t answer, but pulled back far enough to throw a punch, sending a stinging blow across her rescuer’s face before darting away into the shadows of the craggy cliffs.
Rather than chase after him, Linus spun toward her, the concern on his features only easing slightly when he spotted her.
He ran from the shadows toward her, and for the first time she got a look at his face, certain now of his identity.
Linus. The man had a great smile, but right now his lip was bleeding from his fight with her captor, and his expression was one of concern.
“Are you okay?” He bent down beside her.
Julia pointed up the cliffs. “He’s getting away.”
“I called for reinforcements. They’ll catch him. I can’t leave you alone.”
Julia had hold of her bloodied shin. Already a bruise was starting to swell above her short socks.
Linus carefully lifted the injured limb. His touch was gentle, his fingers calloused and comforting as he inspected her injury in the waning light.
“I kicked the cliffs while I was fighting to get away.” Something halfway between a sob and a laugh came from her lips. “I hurt myself more than I hurt him.” Her words were buried under an overwhelming urge to cry. She’d come to Lydia to support her sister, who seemed weighed down by the stress of her new role as queen. How would Monica feel once she found out what had happened?
Julia wondered if she’d been wrong to come to Lydia after all. She’d been unnerved by strange occurrences over the past few weeks. And with her sister in need of a familiar face around the palace, the trip had seemed like a perfect excuse to leave her troubles behind her.
What had happened? Her attack couldn’t be related to her troubles back in Seattle. It just couldn’t. That would mean whoever had tried to hurt her had followed her halfway around the world.
Nobody was that crazy.
Were they?
The man had said he wanted a file. The request fit too closely with the events back home, and yet...which file did he want? And why? What could possibly be so important?
Linus spoke into his earpiece. He quickly relayed what had happened, giving his fellow guards their location and instructing them to try to find her attacker among the cliffs, or on Seaview Drive, the highway that followed the Lydian coast.
Then he returned his attention to her. “Can you walk on it?” Linus bent one gentle arm around her torso as if to help her up.
Fighting back tears, Julia realized there wasn’t time to cry. What if whoever had attacked her came back before Linus’s fellow guards arrived? What if the brute wasn’t alone? Were there other men lurking among the bluffs? She shivered as she tried to stand.
With a tentative hand she reached for the guard. His arms were very muscular, the sweat already drying from the breeze off the sea. She placed her hand on his forearm and felt her heart lurch. What did it mean? There wasn’t time to consider it. Leaning heavily on Linus, she hoisted herself onto her good foot and tested her injured limb.
“Ow.” She winced as her toes touched the sand.
“I need to get you out of here,” Linus cautioned her softly. “Can I carry you?”
“You can try.” She started to protest that she wasn’t as light as she looked, but before she could speak Linus scooped her up, cradling her in his arms as though she didn’t weigh a thing. He turned and trotted down the beach, moving as quickly as she had while jogging.
Tears leaked down her cheeks in spite of her efforts to restrain them. Her ankle throbbed. Somewhere in the craggy cliffs behind them, her attacker was probably escaping.
“Do you have a flashlight?” Julia sniffled back her tears.
“Not on me. Sorry.”
“Shouldn’t we try to find that guy before he gets away?”
“No. We could be outnumbered. That man was a trained fighter.”
The sobs she’d been biting back rippled convulsively through her. Why had a trained fighter attacked her on Lydia’s peaceful beach? She slumped against Linus’s shoulder, grateful he’d intervened.
“I called my fellow royal guards,” Linus assured her, still running. “They’ll look for him.”
“He’ll be long gone.”
“Good. Maybe he won’t ever come back.”
Julia wanted to believe the guard’s assessment. The attack had to have been a fluke, a freak coincidence after the incidents back home. The guy was probably some random weirdo. Surely Linus had chased him away for good.
Right? Just some random weirdo who happened to be a trained fighter.
Who’d jumped out of nowhere when she was the only person around, and asked her for a file, mere weeks after someone had broken into the files in her office.
A random coincidence?
Julia heard a low, pain-filled moan and realized it came from her own lips. She’d come to Lydia to support her sister. But what if she’d brought more trouble to the kingdom of Lydia?
Linus paused at a bench. He lowered her onto the seat as he spoke into his earpiece. “I’m returning Miss Miller to the palace.”
After another brief exchange, he assured her, “Guards are scouring the bluffs.”
“They haven’t found the guy who attacked me?”
“They’re looking for him.” He shook his head apologetically. “It’s dark. Those cliffs have a lot of places where a person can hide. Seaview Drive connects to a number of spur roads into the mountains, besides leading to the border. He could be hiding anywhere.”
Julia nodded and tried not to let her terror show. Her attacker hadn’t been caught after all. He’d gotten away and could return again. Julia shivered, not because of the temperature, but at the thought of her attacker on the loose, somewhere in the vicinity, possibly even watching them from a distance right now. Unable to bear any weight on her bruised ankle, she leaned on Linus and looked past him to the darkness beyond. The sun had set and the first stars twinkled down on them.
The beach looked serene, even in darkness.
But the deceptive darkness hid someone who wanted to hurt her.
TWO
Linus stood panting next to the bench and studied the duchess. A dozen different thoughts warred for attention inside his head, not least among them his concern for Julia’s immediate safety. Where had her attacker gone? Had he been acting alone? Between the darkness and the craggy bluffs, the man could be anywhere.
Why had the duchess been attacked? If the man had meant her immediate harm, he could have knocked her off and run away before Linus could have caught up to him. No, it seemed the man wanted to kidnap her or at least
