style="font-size:15px;"> She stared numbly at the Frenchman’s back before her, the broad shoulders that tapered to a narrow waist and the dull gold of his queue, gleaming in the moonlight against his dark blue coat. If he had been just one more handsome man flirting with her, she could have tossed her head and walked away. She should have done it already, for every step the little mare took was another away from Newport.
She glanced back over her shoulder in the direction they’d come, and her fingers twisted nervously in the worn leather of her reins. She could do it. He didn’t have her bound or tied to the saddle. She’d simply have to pick her best chance, that was all. Eventually they’d have to meet with other people, and then she’d be gone in an instant.
Not that she had a choice. Either she escaped, or she’d lose her soul along with her freedom.
Dear Lord, but she was tired….
“We’ll stop here for now,” said Michel, swinging easily from his horse. They were in a small copse of poplar trees sheltered against a rocky hillside, and the stream that ran beneath the tall grass was fresh, not tidal. “I doubt we’ll find better, and besides, it’s almost dawn.”
She was asleep before he’d finished with the horses, curled on her side with the blanket wrapped tightly around her like a woolen cocoon. Asleep, with her face finally relaxed and her hair simply braided, she looked achingly young. For a long time Michel lay beside her and watched as the rising sun bathed her cheeks with rosy warmth, and he wondered how a man without a conscience could still feel so damned guilty.
He wasn’t sure when he, too, finally slept, but he knew the exact instant he woke. The cold steel of the rifle’s barrel against his temple made that easy.
“On your feet, you rascal,” said the voice at the other end of the rifle. “On your feet, I say, or I’ll shoot you where you lie.”
Chapter Five
Jerusa’s eyes flew open at the sound of the strange man’s voice. This time she was instantly awake, shoving herself free of the blanket as she pushed herself up from the damp grass.
A man in rough homespun with a turkey feather thrust through the brim of his hat was holding his musket over Michel, the dull steel barrel only inches from his cheek. This was her chance, the opportunity she’d gone to sleep praying for, and eagerly she clambered to her feet, brushing the dew from her skirts.
“Not so fast, ye little hussy,” said a voice behind her, and she spun around to see another, younger man with his musket pointed at her. “Ye wouldn’t think we’d take the cockerel an’ let the hen fly free, would ye?”
“But you don’t understand,” she said, favoring him with the most winning smile she could as she tried to smooth back her tousled hair. “You’ve done me a vastly great favor. You’ve rescued me, you see. I don’t wish to be with that man at all.”
The first man guffawed, and she turned to smile at him, too. He was obviously the father of the younger man, for both shared the same bristly red hair and eyebrows so fair as to be nonexistent. Sheep farmers, guessed Jerusa disdainfully, both from the men’s clothing and the land around them, which was too rugged for cultivation, and she wondered if they sold their wool or mutton to her father for export. Maybe they’d be impressed by his name; they certainly weren’t by her smile alone.
“Mighty cozy ye seemed for not wishin’ to be with the man,” said the father, “nesting side by side with him like ye was.”
Jerusa gasped. “Not by choice, I assure you!”
“Choice or not, I know what my eyes seen,” he answered, leering. “And there weren’t much to mistake about what I saw.”
“Not about that, no, but there does appear to be some confusion for you to be accosting us in this manner.” Michel sighed, slowly raising himself to a sitting position with deliberate care so as not to startle the man with the musket into firing. “Or is it the custom in this region to waken travelers at gunpoint?”
“I’ll do what I damn well please with those that cross my land,” declared the older man promptly. “‘Specially them that does it armed themselves.”
“Ah, my pistol.” Michel glanced down ruefully at the gun on the blanket beside him, almost as if he were seeing it for the first time. “But since when is a man not allowed to protect himself and his wife alone on the road?”
“Your wife?” Jerusa stared at Michel, stunned. “I’ll thank you not to call me any such thing!”
“Hold yer tongue, mistress, and let yer husband speak!” ordered the older man sternly.
“But he’s not—”
“I told you to shut yer mouth, woman, or I’ll shut it for ye!” While Jerusa sputtered in relative silence, the man shook his head with pity for Michel. “There’s nothing worse than a yammering shrew who don’t know her place. But then, I warrant I don’t have to tell ye that, sir, do I now?”
“Indeed you don’t.” Sorrowfully Michel, too, shook his head. “I was lured to wed her by her pretty face and her father’s prettier purse, and now I’ll pay until she nags me to my grave.”
“‘Lured’ to wed me? Me?” exclaimed Jerusa. She knew exactly what he was doing, trying to play on the other man’s sympathy as a kind of woe-is-me, beleaguered husband so he’d put down his gun, but still she didn’t care for it one bit. She was the prisoner. The two men should be feeling sorry for her. “Since when did I lure you to do anything? Why, when I—”
“Hush now, dearest, and be quiet for this good man, if not for me.” Michel smiled sadly at the man at the other end of the gun. “You can see why we keep to the back roads. In a tavern or inn, this sorry excuse for a wife thinks nothing of shaming me before an entire company. By the by, I’m Michael Geary.”
“Oh, ‘Michael Geary’ indeed!” said Jerusa indignantly. “I’ll Michael Geary you!”
With her fists clenched she charged toward Michel, intent on doing him the kind of harm she’d learned from having three brothers. How dare Michel do this to her, twisting around everything she said in the worst possible way?
But she hadn’t taken two steps before the young man dipped the barrel of his musket across her shins, tangling it in her skirts so that she stumbled and nearly fell.
“There now, that’ll teach ye to mind yer man,” he said smugly as Jerusa glared at him. “Pa, too, considering as how he likewise told ye to stop yer scolding. My ma knows her place proper.”
Jerusa began to answer, then stopped. She wasn’t getting anywhere with these men, but perhaps the mother might be more willing to listen. Might, that is, if the poor woman weren’t so thoroughly cowed by her dreadful excuse for a husband.
And the red-haired man was dreadful, a man who had made absolutely no attempt to help her when she stumbled, said not a word to chide his son for his treatment toward a lady, and who even now was heaping a shovelful of salt onto her wounded pride by slinging his musket over his shoulder and reaching his hand out to help Michel—Michel!—to his feet.
“The
