Mad About the Marquess (Highland Brides Book 2) (16 page)

She was very nearly enjoying herself.

Which was very nearly a mistake, as her attention was almost diverted from Coachman Rackham, who had been trying to nonchalantly lower his tired old arms, and reach under his box, no doubt in search of a weapon. “Move anozer inch,
Monsieur
coachman, and I shall be obliged to blow you into several thousand terribly messy pieces.” Her voice rose dangerously high, exposing her, she was sure.

But her victims thankfully heard only the angry desperation—enough to make the coachman halt, and quickly raise his hands back to the air.

It was past time for her to finish what she had come to do. “Take zee gems from your wife, milord, and put zem all in zee purse.” She paused while he did so. “And zee sparkling emerald in your lace as well. Now,” she commanded, “leave zee purse on zee ground at your feet for
mes confrères,
the men of
Monsieur Minuit
”—she made up some imaginary conspirators as well as a highwayman’s name on the spot—“to retrieve. Ah, yes, just so.” She complimented him when he complied. “I sank you for your exemplary cooperation.”

She was so close. The money was so close, just lying there on the ground. Waiting. Almost hers.

“
Mes braves, je l’avais
,” she shouted toward the wood, as if her imaginary friends were watching and waiting, hoping her memory of schoolroom French had conjured up the correct conjugation.

But Lord and Lady Digby did not seem to be parsing her French grammar. Instead they obligingly glanced to the woods surrounding them, as if in expectation of a gang of cutthroats.

It gave Quince the confidence she needed to plot out the last moves of this particularly dangerous chess game. “You may remount your coach, milord. Drive on,” she instructed the coachman in a voice made louder from the dangerous surge of power and relief and hope spilling into her veins. She was so close, so very nearly there. “
Allez
! Go!”
 

There were only about ten yards of ground between the team and the downed tree limb, but while the coachman was busy gathering his reins, and moving the equipage forward, he would be too busy to shoot her. So as soon as the landau jolted forward, Quince threw her leg over the pommel of the saddle, ready to jump down.

But she had forgotten the damn rein looped around her thigh. The leather strap twisted around her leg and held fast.

Quince plunged arse over teakettle over the mare’s neck, losing her hat, and landing in a tangle on the ground. It was a long, fraught moment before she could clear her head, and catch her breath, and free her leg from the rein enough to scrabble forward on her hands and knees to snatch up the purse.

She had the suede pouch in her hand, and was pushing to her feet, swiping up her hat and reaching for the reins so she could circle around poor skittish mare and remount, when she heard Sir Harry exhort his coachman. “The gun, mon! Where’s your damn gun?”

Quince didn’t wait to hear anything else. Indeed, she could not hear anything else over the surge of terror pounding like an ocean in her already ringing ears.
 

She shoved the purse down her front, and charged straight for the wood on foot, tearing in the opposite direction from the coach, pulling the mare along, praying that it would be harder for the coachman to retrieve his blunderbuss, and turn, and take aim over Lord and Lady Digby’s heads, than if she had run for the trees closest to her.
 

She hoped and prayed it would be harder to track her on that side—there was no time to do anything but clap her hat onto her head, haul hard on the mare, hunch herself against the shelter of the poor animal’s bulk, and pelt for the trees as if hell and all its flaming minions were pouring after her.
 

The mare’s momentum kept her going a good forty feet into the welcoming cover of the wood. Once hidden by the dark leaves, and with no fatal gunshot chasing her, Quince vaulted into the saddle and spurred the mare into a gallop down the narrow path along the burn that tumbled and churned through the woodland, covering the sound of their headlong flight.

Quince let the canny mare run her own course, while she checked the path behind, twisting in the saddle to peer blindly into the shifting darkness of the wood. But she could see nothing, and if she couldn’t see them, she reasoned, they couldn’t see her.

Cold comfort, but she would take whatever comfort she could get. Her heart was still pounding away like the cannon at Edinburgh Castle on the King’s birthday, she was panting like a frightened dog, and her stomach didn’t feel so equitable either.

Still, she did not rein in until she had gone several miles, and reached the temporary sanctuary of a small stone bridge that forded the stream and marked the spot where the larger wood gave way to open fields outside the city. In the sheltering dark beneath the bridge, she waited, listening over the babble of the burn for any sound that might signal pursuit.

There was none.

Quince slid from the saddle, and all but collapsed into the knee-deep water, trying desperately not to spill her quivering guts into the stream. Waiting for the little firefly flickers of light to recede from the edges of her vision.
 

She cupped some water into her hand to drink, and willed her fractured nerves to knit themselves back together again. So much for the image of the cool, rakish highwayman. She could only be glad that Strathcairn couldn’t see her now, pale and sweating and chilled.
 

And laden with ill-gotten gain.

Quince touched a hand to the bulge beneath her waistcoat, to prove to herself that the fat purse was real. That she had indeed done it, just as she had so audaciously planned.
 

Fortune favors the bold, they said. Well, damned if that wasn’t true.
 

She had done it, hadn’t she? Well, so far, anyway—she still had to get home undetected, and dispose of her loot. And the only way to accomplish it was to set straight to it, erasing all traces of the highwayman.
 

First, she dunked her head in the frigid waters of the burn to wash her face and scrub her hair free of the white powder. Then, she scooped up handfuls of sand to clean the bootblack from her mare’s fetlocks. Next, the white plume and mask went into the jute sack she had rolled at the back of the saddle, as did the pistols, and the colorful sword belt. The rest, she hid under the dark cover of the domino, which she tied across her chest like a silk evening cape.

Now she looked like any gentleman headed to the town for a night of revelry—albeit a thin, damp, nervous young gentleman. In fact, it wasn’t much of a disguise, but it would have to do. All it had to do was get her home safe, to end the night prudently, in her own narrow bed.

She set Piper to a swift canter down the lane, and with every pounding stride, every moment that passed without alarm, the nervous distractions of imminent peril wore off, and prudence seemed less and less necessary. With every hoofbeat her heart grew more and more giddy with relief, and the addictive elation of accomplishment.

And she knew that once she was home and safe, she would still be too thrilled to lay still.

She couldn’t possibly sleep. Not when Strathcairn might be awake.

Chapter Nine

Alasdair was properly put out. Stymied, even.

After five years of hard learning and practice in the art of never letting anything stand in his way or impede his progress, wee Quince Winthrop had managed to utterly confound him.

The lass was nowhere to be found, and it seemed nothing short of a pack of hounds was going to find the vixen now that she had gone to ground—he searched the garden without finding a trace of her. Or of his pistols, which he had last seen somewhere under the hawthorn tree.
 

Or at least he thought he had seen them—he hadn’t exactly been paying attention. He had had other, more nubile, kissable things on his mind.
 

How did she manage to put him so off-balance?
 

Alasdair damned his weakness for his Diana with a pair of flintlocks, and went to check in with the men he had assigned to act as footmen, watching for thefts. “MacGilvray.”

The man snapped to attention as if he were holding a long gun, and not a pitcher of ratafia. “Milord.”

“Anything?”

“No’ a thing, sar. Though it may be just as ye sayed ’bout folks just leavin’ things—some auld hen come up to me, and hands me her fan she does, and off she goes. Still got it, if she do return.” The stout man gestured to the silver tray upon which sat a pitcher of punch, two silver punch glasses, and an ivory handled fan. “Jes’ hopin’ I don’t get no punch on it, sar.”
 

“Just so, MacGilvray.” Damned if it wasn’t just as wee Quince Winthrop had said—people simply didn’t bother to keep track of things that were easy enough to replace with another trip to the drapers or haberdashers.

Alasdair stepped around a toga-clad Roman emperor—and there were six of them to report to Quince when he did see her again—only to come smack up against Lady Plum Winthrop brandishing a shepherdess’s crook.

“Come, my lord,” she ordered presumptively. “We can’t have you standing around in this stupid manner, spending all night looking for her, asking footmen about her. People will think you’re
serious
.” She passed her crook into the hands of one of his nonplussed footmen, and began towing Alasdair toward the dance floor, in much the same presumptive manner as he had earlier towed her younger sister away from that same floor.
 

They certainly weren’t shy, these Winthrop ladies.
 

“It won’t do, you know, for the whole of the world to know you’ve developed a
tendre
for my sister. It will make her insufferably smug, for one thing, and we can’t have that.”

“We can’t?” There were many things he might have called wee Quince Winthrop—flirtatious, infuriating, unapologetic—but smug was not one of them. “Have I?”

Lady Plum Winthrop gave him as withering an eye as ever her sister might have. “Have you not?”

Damn, but these Winthrop women certainly had a way of plain speaking.
 

He supposed, when faced with such a bald fact, that he
had
formed something of a
tendre
for wee Quince Winthrop. Which thankfully wasn’t quite the same thing as an attachment. Nor an understanding. A
tendre
he could manage. Perhaps.
 

With luck. And patience. And a great deal of brandy. And a great deal more kissing.

“And exactly what, Lady Plum, would you advise me to do?”

“Well, for one thing, stop wearing your interest, like your heart, upon your sleeve. And for God’s sake do not take my younger sister out into the garden at a ball to have your experienced, London rake’s way with her.”

Damn his eyes. That was plain enough. Alasdair felt heat singe his collar. “Your pardon, my lady. I did not think my affections were publicly known. I had not thought us observed.”

“You are at a masquerade, my lord—everything is observed. And you have a reputation. Not everyone is blind to a mask, my lord. And is it affection, really?”

The heat scorched across his cheeks, but he was honest enough to give her the truth. “It is,” he finally said. Though it felt strange to admit such a truth out loud. “And I am not a rake.”

Lady Plum remained entirely unconvinced. “You certainly seem one, with your
rendezvous
in the shrubbery, and your stylish London ways. My sister is young and inexperienced, and out of her depth with you, my lord, and I beg you not be so ungentlemanly as to take advantage of her for it.”

Ungentlemanly.
 

Lady Plum’s accusation slapped him as hard as her sister’s palm ever had. Harder. The word was a dagger to his pride. To his very sense of self.

Everything he had done over the past five years, every alliance he had forged, every word he had spoken, had been to prove one thing above all—that he was a gentleman worthy of the marquessate of Cairn.
 

That wee Quince Winthrop has hardly out of her depth with
anyone
, let alone him, was a minor quibble in comparison to the charge that he, Alasdair Colquhoun, might not have acted like a gentleman. He could practically hear his grandfather roaring and rolling in his grave.