A Wedding By Dawn. Alison DeLaine

A man shouted. A large form leaped from the bed just as India scrambled to her feet and darted half-blindly toward the door.

      “Arretez!” the man shouted.

      “Excuse me!” No—French! “Pardonnez!” India stumbled over an open trunk. The woman in the bed screamed loud enough to wake the entire city.

      A pistol shot exploded in the darkness. India screamed and dropped to the floor just as the ball whizzed past her head and slammed into the door. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

      “Henri!” the woman shrieked. “Tirez! Tirez!”

      “No! Don’t shoot!” Thank heaven she could speak French—thank heaven she hadn’t needed to read to learn it. There were shouts from other parts of the hotel. Doors slamming.

      A match flared. “Ne bougez pas!” the man ordered.

      “I won’t—I won’t move!” She kept her head buried and her faced pressed to the floorboards. Footsteps pounded upstairs, outside the room, and she needed to leave now or the chance would be lost. “It’s a mistake,” she told him in French. “You must let me go. Please—quickly! I must go!”

      Candlelight sputtered to life. “Un voleur, eh?” He snorted. “Vous allez le regretter.”

      “I’m not a thief. And I am sorry—very sorry. But I must go!” She started to sit up.

      “Henri, idiot! Tirez!”

      “Tais-toi!” There was a mad rustling as though he were struggling into his clothes. Footsteps thundered outside the room. A crescendo of voices poured through the paper-thin walls. Someone pounded on the door.

      “What is going on in there?” came an angry voice in Italian.

      “Please—you must let me leave by the window. There is a man trying to abduct me, and I was only trying to escape—”

      “Silence! The authorities will make quick work of you.”

      The authorities! “No, you must listen. I am not a thief—ouch!” He yanked her to her feet, not listening at all. “I am staying upstairs with a man who is trying to abduct me!”

      He dragged her to the door.

      “I am not a thief!” If he summoned the authorities, she could end up in gaol.

      He wrenched the door open. Nicholas Warre burst into the room followed closely by a man who could only be the innkeeper. There was a commotion of angry voices—the innkeeper furious over the damaged door, the Frenchman outraged by India’s invasion, the woman screaming and huddling beneath the covers, the onlookers exclaiming from the hallway.

      “I must ask you to release my wife,” Nicholas Warre told the man in French.

      “Your wife!” the man exclaimed.

      Faced with a choice between being mistaken for a thief or being mistaken for Nicholas Warre’s wife, she broke away from the Frenchman and launched herself at Mr. Warre.

      “Oh, Nicholas!” India cried, clinging to him. “Tell this man I’m not a thief.”

      He offered the Frenchman a grim smile. “You have my deepest apologies. I am discovering that my bride has unconventional ways of showing her displeasure with me. The lady was not nearly so eager for our nuptials as her father, I’m afraid.”

      “Nicholas, how can you say such a thing? I was perfectly eager until you brought that...that awful woman into our room and tried to make me— Oh!” His grip tightened painfully. “Would not any bride climb out the window under such circumstances?”

      “You can imagine that whatever justice you might hope to exact, she exacts from me tenfold daily,” he told the Frenchman grimly, and gestured toward the pistol. “In fact, perhaps I ought to beg a favor and ask you to put me out of my misery.”

      The Frenchman made a noise.

      “Shame on you, Nicholas. Sir, perhaps you would be so good as to explain to my husband that a wedding night is meant to be a private evening involving only two people.”

      Laughter erupted in the crowd, and India silently thanked Auntie Phil for being a bit too free in describing her friends’ amorous liaisons.

      Nicholas Warre reached into his pocket and held out a sovereign. “For your trouble—again, with my deepest apologies and my sincerest request that you not summon the authorities.”

      India held her breath.

      The Frenchman narrowed his eyes at the coin, and finally lowered his pistol, stalked forward and snatched it. “Bien. Take her away.” He gestured as if India was a pile of refuse in Nicholas Warre’s arms and turned his anger on the crowd. “All of you, allez! Allez!”

      Nicholas Warre dragged her mercilessly into the crowded hallway.

      “If you would rather be shot than marry me,” she told him under her breath, “I would be happy to arrange it.”

      “If you can find a way to escape your cell aboard the ship,” he growled into her ear, “I invite you to try.”

       CHAPTER FIVE

      INDIA LAY ON a hammock watching candlelight dance on the wooden walls and letting her mind go numb, while Millie stood with her forehead and hands pressed against the door. Their prison was a cabin on the same deck as William’s, bolted across the outside with a heavy wooden slider India had barely glimpsed as William shoved her into the cabin with Millie.

      “I can’t let them put me on trial for piracy,” Millie said against the wood. And then, “William!” Millie’s voice cracked as she cried out and pounded on the door. “William!”

      India had learned years ago that pounding, clawing and shouting would not make a locked door open.

      “Millie, please.” A cold wisp of panic snaked through her, and India snuffed it out quickly.

      Millie stopped shouting. “Are you all right?” she asked quietly.

      “My stomach hurts.” It always hurt when she was locked away, probably because being locked away usually meant going without a meal.

      “I’m sure William will send us dinner,” Millie reassured her. She knew what India had endured as a child—she just didn’t know the full truth of why India had been punished so severely.

      And India wasn’t going to tell her. She wasn’t going to tell anyone, ever, if she could help it.

      At least William would not be entering the cabin every few hours to make irate demands that India do the impossible.

      “I knew Father would send someone after me,” India said now, “but I never thought...” About what that would mean for Millie. Truthfully, she’d never really considered that whomever Father sent might actually succeed in capturing her. “Please forgive me.”

      “It isn’t your fault,” Millie said, turning to lean her back against the door.

      The old Millie, the pre-London Millie, would have snipped that it was India’s fault. The two of them always bickered aboard the Possession. And they still bickered plenty. But ever since London...

      It was as if Millie had built a great stone wall around herself that even India could not break through.

      Perhaps that’s what people did after they’d been beaten nearly to death.

      “The money,” Millie said now. “It was everything I had.” Her tone said she already believed their stash of money hidden aboard the Possession was lost forever.

      “We haven’t left Malta yet,” India said, pressing fingers carefully into her belly, trying to relieve the cramping. “We’re still a stone’s throw from the Possession.”

      Their