The Prisoner Bride. Susan Spencer Paul

not be long now before we stop,” he said, wishing that he might be able to tell her something else. The rain, which had begun to fall softly now, would make their journey far more unpleasant this night than he’d hoped. In a more positive light, it would also help to cover their trail.

      “Good,” she replied tightly, not looking at him. “It appears that we will be obliged to lower the window covers soon. That will give us opportunity to do so.”

      “Aye,” he agreed. “’Twould be wisest to do so before returning the carriage to London. I should hate to see such finery ruined by wet.” He ran one hand appreciatively over the red velvet covering the heavily cushioned seat. For a town carriage that wasn’t meant for travel of any great distance, ’twas both fine and comfortable. True, there wasn’t any glass in the windows, but the heavily waxed window coverings would do just as well for keeping occupants dry in a storm.

      “Return the carriage?” Mistress Glenys asked, looking at him in the singular manner she’d displayed over the past half hour, which said, quite clearly, that she thought him mad. “What can you mean?”

      Even as she spoke, Jean-Marc began to draw the carriage to one side of the road, bouncing them over small rocks and bumps as he drove into a copse of trees. Leaning toward the window, Kieran whistled in greeting to a man who appeared there, already leading a pair of horses from their hiding place.

      Jean-Marc brought the carriage to an unsteady halt. Even before it had fully stopped Kieran opened the door and alighted, looking up first to where Jean-Marc sat to make certain all was well.

      “No one followed,” Jean-Marc called down to him, tying the leads to the carriage post. “Had a bit of company, but that’s what comes from being on a main road.” He lightly hopped down from the driver’s seat. “Better hurry if we want to reach Bostwick’s before many more hours.”

      “Aye, and without being found out,” Kieran agreed. Overhead, a loud rumble of thunder rolled across the sky, and the next moment the rain began to fall harder. It wasn’t a deluge yet, but that would happen soon enough. He stretched a hand into the carriage and said, “Hurry, now. We must be on our way.”

      Mistress Glenys gave him a look filled with furious disbelief. “You can’t mean to…to ride on horseback in this rain?”

      “’Tis just what I mean,” he told her, impatiently holding his hand more firmly out to her. “Come, mistress. We’ve a distance to cover before we’re safe away. Set your headcover about you, if you have one, and your maid as well.”

      “We have none!” she cried angrily. “We had no plan to travel far beyond Metolius this day.”

      “Then you must brave the rain as best you can. Thank a merciful God you had the sense to bring your heavy cloaks.” Behind him, he could hear Jean-Marc and Tom Postleheth readying the steeds for riding. Kieran cast one glance at them, saying, “Give Tom his gold, Jean-Marc, and let him be on his way.” Turning back to Glenys, he stated, “Come of your own will, mistress, or I will drag you from this carriage. I vow it before God.”

      Suiting action to word, he leaned in to grasp her arm. She shoved him violently away before he could make his grip firm.

      “Do not touch me or my maid,” she commanded in a tone so regal that Kieran could not countermand it, not even with one of his famous smiles. “Ever,” she added stiffly. Gathering her skirts, she spoke with equal sharpness to her maid, who had begun to weep again. “Come, Dina. I suppose we must make the best of this wretchedness, even if we take chill from the rain and die of it.” She descended from the carriage, head held high, refusing to accept Kieran’s steadying hand, right into the rain. Kieran didn’t realize that he was staring at her as she stepped away until the maid, Dina, cleared her throat and set her tiny hand upon his arm. Coming to himself, Kieran helped her descend.

      It took but a few brief moments to fix the window coverings on the carriage and settle matters with Tom—good, proper thief that he was. Kieran made certain that he knew where to leave the carriage along the road, near London, hopefully before being discovered. The two menservants, John and Willem, would have been found in the alley where they’d been left and safely delivered back to Metolius by now, and the Seymour family would have alerted the London sheriff. An entire party of rescuers might already be on their trail, but Kieran believed they’d be able to evade them, and once they made Bostwick’s, they’d be well and safe.

      “There are only two horses,” Mistress Glenys stated amid the rumblings of more thunder, pulling her heavy cape more closely about her. She had no hood, and the rain had begun to soak her hair, so that the wayward tendrils he’d admired earlier clung to her cheeks. The maid was faring somewhat better, for Jean-Marc had lifted his own cloak to cover her. Kieran would have done the same for Mistress Glenys—knowing full well that she wouldn’t have allowed it—but she was a tall female, coming up past his shoulders, and the attempt would have proved fruitless.

      “Aye, just two,” he told her, taking her shoulder in a firm grasp that she couldn’t shake off. “You will ride with me, mistress. Come.”

      She gave no fight, clearly realizing that it would do her no good now, but let him lead her to where his great destrier stood waiting.

      “’Tis a very large, fine horse for so sorry a knave,” she stated, setting her hand upon the wet pommel as if she could possibly lift herself up into the saddle without aid.

      “Aye, but he is mine, nonetheless.” Kieran bent, folding his hands together to give her a boost up. “His name is Nimrod,” he said, easily tossing Mistress Glenys upward and moving so that she could swing her legs about to sit in the saddle. As he wiped his wet hands against his leggings, he added, “My father named him that apurpose before giving him to me, which you will doubtless believe wise.” He swung up into the saddle behind her, reaching forward at once to take hold of the reins. He was glad that she hadn’t attempted an escape. It would have been fruitless, of course, but also unpleasant and a waste of time.

      “Your father recognizes you, then?” she asked, her tone more one of disdain than curiosity. She had taken note of the “Fitz” in his name, knowing that it branded him as either bastard-born or descended of a bastard, and was purposefully stating the fact out loud in order to give him insult. Or so it seemed to Kieran, but the matter of his birth and family had ever been his sorest spot. She could hardly have aimed any arrow more accurately.

      “I am well recognized,” he told her tautly, waiting for Dina and Jean-Marc to mount their steed before setting Nimrod into motion, “by all my family. It can be more of a burden, at times, than a blessing.”

      She gave a mirthless laugh and muttered, “Aye, ’tis so.”

      Kieran set one arm firmly about her, holding the reins with the other, and gently prodded Nimrod forward, away from the road and farther into the trees. Water dripped from the leaves, soaking them, and the wind began to blow even more coldly.

      “Where do we go?” Mistress Glenys asked, holding herself as stiffly as a statue within the circle of his arm. Despite that, and despite the heavy cloak and clothing she wore, she was unmistakably female, warm against the front of him and clean-scented and far more soft—delightfully so—than he’d initially believed. He tightened his hold with gentle pressure, and felt her draw in a breath.

      “To a place some miles away.”

      A low, wet branch brushed against her face, and with a sound of aggravation she thrust it aside.

      “Are there no decent roads leading to it, or must you take us only to such dens of iniquity as exist far out of the reach of civil establishment?”

      That tone of hers, so proper and rigid and filled with disapproval, made him smile. It reminded him greatly of his mother during one of the many lectures she’d given Kieran over the past years.

      “’Tis warm and dry, and that is what will concern us most once we reach it. And, nay, we will take no roads for some while. The rain will cover our tracks well enough, but I’ll take no chances till we’re