Disrobed and Dishonored. Louise Allen

      The question became academic as she rounded a corner and found herself staring down the barrel of a large horse pistol. ‘Stand and deliver.’

      A highwayman? They really said that? Sarah discovered her mouth was open and shut it. The figure confronting her was straight off any broadsheet telling the shocking stories of Dick Turpin or “Hell” Hawley. A big, ugly gray horse, a tricorne hat, a cloak thrown back over his shoulders despite the heat and a black mask covering the upper half his face.

      She dragged Sir Jeremy’s string of pearls over her head and held it out. He was welcome to them.

      ‘No, I don’t want those, sweetheart.’ His voice was amused, educated and deep; it seemed to resonate at the base of her spine. A gentleman gone to the bad?

      From somewhere she found her voice. ‘What do you want then?’

      ‘One kiss and a little token to show for it.’ He urged the horse up alongside her mare and she realized it was not just the horse that was big. She made herself sit still and not flinch away.

      And then she found she did not want to. ‘A kiss?’ He was clean-shaven, his teeth white as he smiled in the evening light. The breeze brought her not the rank smell of unwashed robber that she had been expecting, but the clean odors of leather and citrus. ‘It is not gallant to jest! You may have the pearls and welcome.’

      ‘No.’ He took the pearls in an ungloved hand and dropped them back around her neck, holstered the pistol and leaned toward her, doffing his hat. ‘I do not jest.’

      His hair was dark brown, overlong, waving from the pressure of the hat. His eyes were green, shadowed by the mask, and yet when he smiled she could just see the laughter lines in the corners, the humor.

      ‘Just one kiss?’

      He nodded as she bit her lip in indecision, his mouth curving in a way that made her want to touch it. ‘If you will grant it. I do not steal from women.’

      What if she should kick her heels and send the mare plunging past him? He leaned down and took the reins as though he could read her mind. Sarah stared at him, wondering why she did not scream. He really was a very strange highwayman. And she was in a very strange mood. She was conscious of her heartbeat— that was trepidation, no doubt—but what to make of the warm feeling low in her belly or the fact that her lips were dry? Sarah licked them and saw his eyes follow the movement.

      ‘Why have you a corn dolly in your buttonhole?’

      ‘A token from the donor of my second kiss. It is a fertility symbol, I believe, but don’t worry, kisses are harmless.’

      An interesting definition of harmless! ‘Very well. I have nothing better to be doing this evening, after all.’ She tipped up her face, turning her cheek toward him and closing her eyes. And then she felt his breath warm on her skin and realized he really was only going to take what she offered and some madness seized her.

      She opened her eyes and moved her head and met the hooded green gaze and his mouth found hers. ‘Oh!’ As she gasped his tongue slid between her lips and his free arm went around her shoulders and he lifted her against him so she was standing in the stirrup while the kiss went on…and on…and the warm evening world spun around her and his heat and the questing invasion of his tongue filled her senses and she gripped his lapels and touched her tongue to his and thought she would faint from the intensity of it.

      And then she was back in the saddle and they were looking at each other as though the earth had just shifted beneath them. He seemed to be breathing rather heavily. She rather thought that if she did not loosen her stay laces that breathing would no longer be possible.

      ‘Madam,’ he said at last. ‘I must thank you for giving me the most precious thing in your possession. May I ask for a token, also?’

      Sarah took hold of three or four hairs that had come down from her topknot of curls, tugged them free and held them out to him. He bowed slightly and curled them with care around the corn dolly. He thought her kiss precious? A highwayman’s opinion of her kiss was certainly more acceptable than Sir Jeremy’s hypocritical valuation of her virginity.

      ‘Sir, that is not the most precious thing I possess.’ The words left her lips without conscious thought.

      ‘It is not?’ The green eyes rested on her face.

      ‘No. I am a virgin.’

      The gray tossed its head as though its rider had clenched his hand on the reins. ‘Ma’am?’ She saw him swallow.

      ‘And that is something of a burden to me, just now,’ she confessed.

      ‘Indeed?’ He looked, not shocked, but interested.

      Somehow the story tumbled out. How she came to be recounting such intimate details to a complete stranger, a man—a rogue—Sarah could not fathom. Why she was not sliding from Daisy’s back in a pool of embarrassment, she had no idea, but she did not even seem to be blushing. It could only be her desperation and the utter seriousness with which he was listening to her.

      ‘In short,’ she concluded, ‘my father plans to marry me to a lecherous, hypocritical excuse for a gentleman for whom my only virtue appears to be my—well, my virtue.’

      ‘If you were not a virgin, he would not be interested,’ the highwayman remarked.

      ‘Well, I am, so there’s nothing to be done about it.’

      ‘You could have a frank discussion with a married lady, discover some, er…details and inform your chaperone that you have lost your virtue, describing the experience so she had no doubts,’ he suggested in a matter-of-fact manner, as though they were puzzling over some trivial problem.

      ‘There is no one I could talk to.’ If only her good friend Jessica was home from her honeymoon by now! She would enter into this scheme with complete frankness, but it would be another two weeks and that was too late. ‘I do not think that anything less than firsthand experience would do. I can hardly make it up. But thank you, it was a very good idea.’ She sighed, feeling the tears beginning to well up in her eyes again. She bit down hard on her lip to stop them; weeping and moaning was not going to get her out of this fix.

      The gray backed away and she glanced up at its rider’s face. Below the mask his mouth was set. He looked somewhat grim. ‘I could help you.’

      ‘Describe…it?’ she faltered, finding she could blush, after all.

      ‘No. I doubt I could, from a woman’s point of view. No, more practically, we—’

      ‘You want to take my virginity?’ Her voice emerged as a squeak. Daisy tossed her head, catching her mistress’s sudden panic.

      ‘No, but I could almost take your virginity.’

      ‘Almost.’ The light was beginning to fade and she was not able to make out the nuances of his expression beneath the mask. His tone was pitched somewhere between appalled and amused.

      ‘Almost. Just so you get the idea. Have you any knowledge of the theory, Miss, er…?’

      ‘Sarah,’ she said shortly. ‘No, not much. I know it hurts and I know there is the danger of becoming pregnant and I have no desire for the former experience and certainly none for the latter.’

      ‘I promise that neither would be the case.’

      ‘Are you mad?’ she inquired, more of herself than of him. He did not appear to be deranged and if he was an evil seducer, he was certainly going about it in a most original way. And she was beginning to find the preposterous, shocking suggestion positively…possible.

      ‘I know you did not rob me just now, or ravish me,’ she said, frowning at him in the twilight. ‘And you could have done either, quite easily. I liked the way you kissed me, although I should not. You appear to be a man of principle, even if you do earn your living in an illegal manner.’

      He shook his head, seeming