To Seduce a Sinner (Legend of the Four Soldiers #2)(52)
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt

“Dammit! Come out or I’m coming in, and I’ll be shooting when I do!”

Melisande’s maid moaned, low and fearful, Mouse struggled, but his dear wife held him firmly and was silent. A smart robber would start killing the servants outside one by one to force them to emerge. But this highwayman might just be stupid enough to—

The carriage door was flung open, and a man holding a pistol leaned into the carriage. Jasper grabbed his gun arm and pulled hard. The gun went off, shattering the opposite carriage window. The maid screamed. The robber half fell into the carriage. Jasper twisted the pistol away from him.

“Don’t look,” he said to Melisande, and slammed the pistol grip down on the man’s temple, shattering the bone. He did it quickly again, three more times, vicious and hard, just to make sure the man was dead, then dropped the pistol. He hated handling guns.

From outside came a shout and then a gunshot.

“Damn. Get down,” he ordered Melisande and the girl. A bullet could blow right through the wood of the carriage. She didn’t protest and lay across her seat with the maid and the dog.

Running footsteps came nearer, and Jasper moved in front of the women, bracing himself.

“My lord!” Pynch’s broad face peered into the carriage door. “Are you safe, my lord? Are the women—?”

“Yes, I think so.” Jasper turned to Melisande, running his hands over her face and hair in the dark. “Are you all right, my dearest love?”

“Y-yes.” She straightened immediately, her back as straight as ever, and a pang tore at his heart. If ever she were hurt, if ever he could not protect her . . .

The maid was trembling violently. Melisande let go of the dog and pulled the girl into her arms, patting her back comfortingly. “It’s all right. Lord Vale and Mr. Pynch have kept us safe.”

Mouse jumped to the floor of the carriage and growled at the dead robber.

Pynch cleared his throat. “We’ve captured one of the highwaymen, my lord. The other galloped away.”

Jasper looked at him. Gunpowder blackened half of Pynch’s face. Jasper grinned. His valet had always been an excellent shot.

“Help me get this one out of the carriage,” he told Pynch. “Melisande, please stay here until we are sure it’s safe.”

She nodded bravely, her chin up. “Of course.”

And even though Pynch and the maid were watching, Jasper couldn’t help leaning over to kiss her hard. It had all happened so fast. If things had turned out a little differently, he might’ve lost her.

Jasper scrambled from the carriage, eager to meet the man who’d put his sweet wife in danger. First, though, he helped Pynch pull the kyncmbldead robber out of the carriage. He hoped Melisande hadn’t looked too closely. He’d crushed the robber’s cheekbone and temple.

Mouse jumped down from the carriage.

Jasper straightened. “Where is he?”

“Over here, my lord.” Pynch gestured to a tree by the side of the road where several footmen stood over a recumbent figure. Mouse trailed behind them, sniffing the ground.

Jasper nodded and asked as they walked to the group, “Anyone shot?”

“Bob the footman has a graze on his arm,” Pynch reported. “No one else was hit.”

“You’ve checked?” In the dark, with all the excitement, sometimes a man could be shot and not even know it.

But Pynch had been in the army as well. “Yes, my lord.”

Jasper nodded. “Good man. Have a footman light some more lanterns. Light drives away all manner of vermin.”

“Yes, my lord.” Pynch headed back to the carriage.

“And what have we here?” Jasper asked as he came on the group of footmen.

“One of the robbers, my lord,” Bob said.

He held a cloth against his upper right arm, but the pistol in his hand was steady and pointed at their prisoner. Pynch arrived with a lantern, and they all looked down at the robber. He wasn’t much more than a child, a boy not yet twenty, his chest bleeding profusely. Mouse sniffed the boy, then lost interest and urinated on the tree.

“He’s still alive?” Jasper asked.

“Just barely,” Pynch said impassively. It must’ve been his shot that had brought the boy off his horse, but Pynch didn’t show any pity.

Then again, this boy had held a gun on them. He could’ve shot Melisande. A horrible image of Melisande lying where the boy was rose up in Jasper’s mind. Melisande with her chest blown open. Melisande struggling to draw air into shattered lungs.

Jasper turned away. “Leave him.”

“No.”

He looked up and saw Melisande, standing outside the carriage despite his explicit orders to stay inside.

“Madam?”

She didn’t back down, though his tone was chilly. “Have him brought with us, Jasper.”

He stared at her, illuminated by lantern light, looking ethereal and fragile. Too fragile. He said gently, “He could’ve killed you, my heart.”

“But he didn’t.”

She might look fragile, but her core was made of iron.

He nodded, his gaze still fixed on her. “Wrap him in a blanket, Pynch, and take him up on your horse with you.”

Melisande frowned. “The carriage—”

“I won’t have him near you.”

She looked at him and must’ve seen she wasn’t getting her way in this. She nodded.

Jasper glanced at Pynch. “You can bandage his wound when we get to the inn. I don’t like lingering in this spot any longer than we have to.”

“Yes, my lord,” Pynch said.

Then Jasper walked to his lady wife and took her arm, warm and alive beneath his fingers. He bent his head and murmured in her ear, “I do this for you, my heart. Only for you.”

She looked up at him, her face a pale moon in the darkness. “You do it for yourself as well. It’s not right to let him die alone, no matter what he did.”

He didn’t bother arguing. Let her think he worried about such matters if she wished. He led her to their carriage and bundled her inside, closing the door. Even if the highwayman lived a few hours more, he could no longer hurt Melisande, and that was all that mattered in the end.

MELISANDE SIGHED WHEN the door closed to her inn room later that evening. Vale always acquired two rooms at the inns they stayed in, and tonight was no different. Despite the excitement of the near robbery, despite the dying robber—who’d been carried into a back room—despite the fact that the little inn was nearly full, Melisande still found herself in a solitary room.