Chasing the Heiress Read Free Page A

far to the next inn?”
    Fletcher held up two fingers, then three. Two to three miles.
    Colin moved slowly to the open carriage door, calling out in case Marietta’s ears had recovered from the pistol shots. “Marietta, there’s an inn within the hour.”
    He stepped in front of the open door. Marietta was seated on the floor, leaning against the backward-facing seat riser, her legs bent at odd angles. Her eyes closed, she held one hand to her chest; the other cradled her belly. At her shoulder, blood seeped through her fingers, covering her hand and staining the front of her chemise. Blood pooled on the floor below her.
    Colin’s chest clenched. He swung himself into the carriage, yelling “Fletcher! Drive!” as he pulled the door shut behind him.
    He pulled off his cravat and tore it into strips to make a bandage, then crawled beside her.
    To stage an attack and steal nothing . . . not robbery. Murder. He needed to think. But first he needed to slow Marietta’s bleeding.
    The carriage began to move, first slowly, then faster, and faster still.
    * * *
    Lady Arabella Lucia Fairbourne plunged her hands into the wash water, reaching for another dish. By pure luck, she’d found work as a scullery maid at an inn—and with it servant’s lodgings. A place to hide.
    Several times in the last fortnight, the innkeeper’s wife, Nell, had offered her the easier work of waiting on guests in the dining hall, but each time she had refused. The dining hall was too public. Someone might recognize her.
    She pulled her hands from the water and examined them, first on one side, then the next. Fingers puckered, cuticles split, palms roughened and red. Her hands looked like those of a woman who worked for a living. The hands of a scullery maid doing hard but honest labor. She smiled. She was exhausted, but free.
    She preferred useful labor to idle luxury, even if that work was washing dishes rather than caring for the wounded in her father’s regiment. Others would consider working in a tavern kitchen a reversal of fortune, but then, they had never lived in her cousin’s house. She pressed her palm against the seam of her dress on the outside of her leg. She felt the comforting thickness where she had sewn in the papers her great-aunt Aurelia had entrusted to her. “Take this letter to my old love, Sir Cecil Grandison.” Aurelia’s frail hand had patted Lucy’s gently. “He’ll understand what to do.”
    A curl of jet-black hair tickled her cheek. Drying her fingers against the rough wool of her skirt, she tucked the curl back under the edge of her soft mob bonnet. At a secondhand clothier, she had traded her best walking dress for an ill-fitting servant’s dress dyed a somber blue, and she’d bought the shopgirl’s silence with a pair of embroidered slippers barely worn. Lucy the scullery maid looked nothing like the lady her cousin’s men sought.
    She dried the platter with a soft cloth. From the windows far above her head, a soft light suffused the kitchen. Evening. Her favorite time of day. Guests, servants, and family all fed, the kitchen cleaned for the night, and Alice, the cook, leaving her alone to finish the washing. Even so late in the day, the autumn sun would be out for another hour or two, allowing her some time in the inn’s private garden. Separated from the public yard by a high wall on the courtyard side and thick hedges on all others, the garden made her feel almost as safe as she felt in the kitchen.
    But feeling safe was different from being safe. The roads were still too full of her cousin’s men to try another move. Only that afternoon, she’d seen the one called Ox (“Oaf” she thought would be more appropriate) looking around the stable yard while his horses were changed.
    He hadn’t seen her. She had been looking out of the window of the attic room she shared with Mary, the cook’s helper.
    Ox