Amanda Rose Read Free

Even before his brain had properly recognized the opportunity, his body, made desperate by the situation, acted. Before he was conscious that he meant to do it, he swung around, jerking his wrists from the guard’s hold, freeing them from the as-yet-untied rope in a single, violent movement that ended with his hands bunched into two fists that slammed into the astonished man’s temples like twin anvils. The guard crumpled with a single grunt; the other guard, the one with the rifle, looked back just in time to see Matt going over the side of the platform in a low, fast dive. Automatically he jerked his rifle up and fired. Matt felt the stinging sensation of a bullet plowing through the side of his right hip, but he didn’t slow down.
    “Escape! Grayson’s escaped!”
    “Look out!”
    “Get out of the way, you fools!”
    The report of the rifle mingled with the screams of the crowd. They panicked at the sound of gunfire, taking to their heels like stampeding cattle. Matt ran with them, knowing it would be hard to spot him among so many fleeing bodies. Dirty and unkempt as he was, dressed in torn rags, he looked no different from many of London’s army of the poor. A tremendous burst of strength surged through his veins; he felt suddenly vitally alive, reborn. He had escaped—he would escape. Spying a fat burgher astride a rearing horse just ahead of him and to his right, near the fringe of the crowd, Matt fought his way through the screaming, streaming mass of people to the man’s side.
    “Get down,” he growled, and to make sure there was no possibility of mistake, he grabbed the frightened horse’s bridle with one hand and the man’s belt with the other. Before the perspiring burgher could do more than gape down at him, Matt had hauled him out of the saddle and vaulted up himself.
    “My horse,” the man cried. Then, with a note of horror, “It’s him. ”
    But Matt had already set his heels to the horse’s sides. He sent the animal plunging toward the edge of the crowd, knocking down those who were slow to get out of his way. Curses and screams followed his progress. Another shot—from a pistol, by the sound of it—whistled frighteningly close to his head. This added to the crowd’s panic, which aided him. He reached the road at last and crossed it quickly, too canny to travel on it in either direction. They would look for him first along the road …
    Leaning low in the saddle, one hand pressed tight against his hip in an effort to stem the blood that ran warm and sticky down his side, he galloped across the field that ran at a right angle to the road. He had no idea whether they were after him yet; in his lightning glances back he had seen no one, no cavalry charge of soldiers brandishing rifles, no rush of guards on fat farm animals. Likely the crowd was hampering pursuit—not that it mattered. If they weren’t hard on his heels now, they soon would be. They would search the four corners of the kingdom for him if need be.
    His escape would be a hideous black eye for Queen Victoria’s government, and they would be tireless in their quest for vengeance. The odds were high that he wouldn’t get more than five miles before he was captured. Matt’s teeth gleamed brightly in the morning sun as he considered that. He’d always been one to bet on long shots, and as often as not, they’d paid off. That brief smile flashed again as he sent the horse over a low stone wall and into the valley below it. The odds had been considerably higher this morning that he would be dead by now. Instead, he was alive, free as the air, the sun warm on his face and a horse beneath him. He just might manage to cheat the devil one more time. Thinking that, for the first time in a long while Matt laughed out loud.

chapter two
    “Damn .”
    Lady Amanda Rose Culver took intense satisfaction from uttering a word that, had they heard it, would have sent the good nuns with whom she lived into a collective swoon. Savoring the